Announcing Speed Enhancements and Hosted Builds for Harness Continuous Integration

We are excited to announce feature enhancements for the Harness Continuous Integration (CI) module designed to deliver the fastest CI builds available in the market, along with hosted builds as a fully managed cloud service offering. New Cache Intelligence, enhanced Test Intelligence™, and Starter Templates deliver additional time savings for both Harness CI’s SaaS and on-premise offerings.

Harness’s new CI features demonstrate Harness’s commitment to delivering a world-class developer experience for our customers. These new CI features deliver both speed and simplicity – all built on the open source backbone of Drone, renowned for its vibrant community of more than 50,000 active users. 

CI Architected for Speed, Simplicity, and Scale

Harness CI hosted builds enable developers to create and run a pipeline in as little as a minute, without having to take on any of the burden of the necessary infrastructure to do so. Removing onerous processes, such as provisioning server build farms and manually turning off test systems in the cloud, enables developers to spend more time writing code and less time dealing with the ingredients necessary to complete their builds quickly.

Harness CI hosted builds are available as a fully managed cloud service offering, with high availability and built-in backup and recovery to ensure business continuity. Enterprise organizations further benefit from CI’s ability to define and scale processes, security, and compliance across teams and repositories using Policy as Code and pre-built templates. With these features, it’s easier to create and enforce consistent processes across the organization. 

Hosted builds are offered for all subscription levels: Free, Team, and Enterprise. In this new pricing model, credits are used to pay for build execution time, depending on the type of target environment used (OS type, machine resources, etc.). New users can take advantage of 2,000 free credits at signup, which equates to approximately 2,000 build minutes on Linux systems. 

Efficiencies Driven by Machine Learning

Time spent waiting for builds to run is a common and painful issue impacting developers in software delivery. Valuable developer time would obviously be better spent creating differentiating features for your customers than waiting for a build to complete. Harness CI’s proprietary Cache Intelligence reduces pipeline execution time by using machine learning (ML) to automatically cache well-known directories for Java and Node.js to avoid overloading compute processing power, dramatically decreasing build times. With Cache Intelligence, developers can spend less time waiting for builds to finish and more time coding or debugging. Harness leverages intelligence within Harness CI so developers get build speed benefits without effort.

Harness CI’s exclusive, ML-powered Test Intelligence™ feature delivers even more time savings now with the addition of test concurrency, which splits the necessary tests so that they can be run simultaneously. Harness CI Test Intelligence™ determines which subset of tests are necessary based on code changes while providing visibility into which tests were selected and why. After the required tests are identified, these tests are run concurrently to further accelerate build time without compromising quality. Test Intelligence™ reduces build cycles by up to 90%, so developers are no longer wasting valuable time waiting around for builds to finish. 

Get Started Building and Running Pipelines Faster 

As teams have become more geographically distributed and development environments more complex, onboarding new developers can take as long as three to four weeks. Harness CI has made developer onboarding faster with starter templates for most programming languages, including .Net, Java, Go, Node.js, Python, Ruby, PHP, Rust, and more. With language-specific templates, developers don’t have to hunt for dependencies or create their own environments which delay getting started.  With Starter Templates, developers can start building and running pipelines faster, and spend less time learning how to use new tools and systems. Customers can further speed up the onboarding process with Harness CI’s SaaS offering, as hosting on premises can also delay onboarding when having to build and maintain server build farms.  

In addition Harness provides an intelligent YAML editor with schema validation and auto-complete recommendations to expedite the configuration experience. The Harness visual pipeline editor also provides a guided experience for building, debugging, and running pipelines quickly. Developers of all levels will be able to reduce toil and spend their time doing what they enjoy doing: writing code.  

Lastly, developers can now run their pipelines anywhere as Harness CI has added a Docker runner and expanded operating system support to Mac OS, in addition to Windows and Linux.

Try Out Harness Continuous Integration Today 

See for yourself just how fast Harness CI can be. Not only does Harness CI help optimize performance, it’s all designed with the developer experience in mind. Get started with a free trial today.