Retiring Harness CD Community Edition in favor of Gitness

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We are retiring the Harness CD Community Edition in favor of Gitness to deliver the true promise of a simple CD pipeline.

*Harness Open Source is the evolution of Gitness and takes it to the next level by offering an end-to-end software delivery platform that enhances productivity and accelerates software development cycles. Learn more here.

We launched the Harness CD Community Edition as a free, source-available edition of the Harness CD & GitOps module in January 2022. Our intent was to help new users of Harness CD & GitOps learn and use the product in a lightweight (as measured by low resource utilization) and self-managed (as opposed to our SaaS edition) form factor. We received excellent feedback and were able to deliver many of the goals we started out with. However, the true promise of a simple CD pipeline is now better delivered by Gitness, the open source software development platform that we launched at Unscripted in September 2023. As a result, we are retiring the Harness CD Community Edition in favor of Gitness. This means that the currently available release will become the last release and no new releases will be made in the future. Additionally, the underlying source code repositories that were licensed under PolyForm source available licensing will become private.

We recommend all Harness CD Community Edition users download and use Gitness for their day-to-day CD needs. Given that Gitness also includes a git-compliant source code management system combined with the power of Drone pipelines, we are confident that this will be a significantly positive outcome for our user community.

What is Gitness?

Gtiness is a new open source Git solution with the breadth and depth of features to empower development teams to write and deliver code with safety and speed. It's a one-stop-shop where you can host your git repositories and automated CI/CD pipelines seamlessly. Say goodbye to juggling multiple tools, and hello to streamlined collaboration, and a smoother development workflow. With this announcement, Harness is doubling down on making Gitness a reliable platform for developers.

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For more detail, you can review the following blog posts:

Using Gitness for Basic CD

As the Deploying to Kubernetes with Gitness blog highlights, Gitness pipelines are a great way to get started with your basic CD journey. Every step in the Gitness pipeline runs on its own isolated container instance. And steps can be configured to perform application builds, create docker images as well as push the images to a Docker registry. Similarly, we can also use these steps to launch Kubernetes deployment commands such as kubectl or helm install. This ability forms the foundation of a basic CD pipeline where changes to code will not only trigger a build that generates a container image as an artifact but also automatically deploy the generated artifact onto the deployment target of your choice (which in the case of the above blog was Kubernetes).

Upgrading from Gitness to Harness CD & GitOps

Harness CD & GitOps is the world’s most advanced CD platform. It is purpose-built for the world’s most demanding enterprises, enabling support to deploy any app to any infrastructure platform (Kubernetes, Serverless Functions, Traditional VMs), advanced deployment strategies (Canary, Blue-Green) with powerful pipelines to orchestrate critical business requirements including governance, intelligent deployment verification with auto rollback of failed deployments, rich integration ecosystem for developer workflows, and much more. You can try Harness CD & GitOps for free today on the Harness SaaS Platform. However, if you need a self-managed yet lightweight option, then Gitness is the recommended way to get started.

Gitness has the ability to upgrade to Harness SaaS Platform where the Gitness pipelines get automatically converted to Harness CI pipelines. The addition of a new Harness CD & GitOps stage to this pipeline is the next step. This will add the advanced CD & GitOps capabilities to this pipeline where the power of Harness delegates, external secrets management, audit trails and pipeline governance come to light.