Shipped by Harness - April 2024 Product Updates

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Table of Contents

Welcome to the April 2024 edition of Shipped by Harness. Springtime is in the air here in the Northern Hemisphere. At Harness, we have been hard at work so you can delight your customers without facing software delivery toil. Here is what has been changing in the previous month across Harness Products.
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Accelerate Innovation Through DevOps Modernization

Accelerate the pace of innovation by employing a modern DevOp approach for software delivery.

Continuous Delivery & GitOps

Enhanced Failure Strategy Signal - Designing for failure and recovery is a great design principle especially when dealing with Continuous Delivery. In Early Access behind a feature flag, a failure/interrupt signal can propagate across all executing stages in a pipeline triggering those failure strategies.

Additional Execution Expressions Available in the UI - As your pipelines grow more dynamic, expressions and variables are important to help template out decisions and scale across teams. In Early Access behind a feature flag, now the execution context is available for each Step, along with the inputs and outputs.

Feature Flags

Learning Feature Flag Implementations Getting Easier - We shipped an enhancement to the GettingStarted application that shows how to have a non-blocking initialization on the client side SDK.

Chaos Engineering

Chaos/Resilience Testing on Windows Improved - A good chaos experiment is a blackhole experiment. A blackhole experiment blocks network traffic to a system, thus creating a blackhole. Added functionality to gracefully about the experiment for Windows hosts.
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Improve Developer Experience

Fostering a culture of continuous innovation and improvement.

Internal Developer Portal

Updated Workflow Visualizations - Developers leveraging IDP can now enjoy updated workflow visualizations thanks to the latest Backstage upgrade. Logs are now available for successful executions also as part of the improvements.

Introduction of Catalog Metadata Ingestion API - A hallmark of an IDP is to tie together data from multiple sources. With the introduction of the new Ingestion API, users now have the capability to append or update metadata associated with catalog entities. This feature facilitates the integration of metadata sourced from disparate systems such as cost trackers, service health checkers, security scans, or even from simple spreadsheets tracking personnel details allowing for simpler aggregation and integration.

Code Repository

Natural Language Codebase Searches - Searching for specific items in code can be hit or miss in the repository especially if you are not sure what you are looking for. Now thanks to the help of AIDA [AI Development Assistant] you can perform natural language searches such as “where is the application entry point”.

AI Generated PR Summaries - Comments/granularity inside of Pull Requests can vary engineer to engineer since these are usually human centric tasks. Now thanks to the help of AIDA, PR Summaries can be generated to describe items such as the purpose and impact of code changes.

Software Engineering Insights

Incident Recovery Time (MTTR Report) / PagerDuty Integration - The DORA MTTR Report can now take in data/incidents from PagerDuty directly. PagerDuty as an incident response platform can be a system of record for MTTR with start and end times of incidents. This data can be directly integrated into SEI.
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Secure Software Delivery

Integrate security into every phase of the software development lifecycle.

Security Testing Orchestration

Open Policy Agent (OPA) Integration for Security Test Results - Now with the power of OPA, you can craft policies to execute against security test results. Depending on the policy, you can stop/interrupt the pipeline if a violation that matches a policy is found. For example, a test can not include CVEs past a certain age or a security test can not have critical severities in certain libraries.

One Click Configuration for Scanners - Standing up STO has never been easier. With one click / rapid configuration, adding a scanner to STO has reduced configuration. GitLeaks, OWASP Dependency Checker, Aqua Trivy, Anchor Grype, and Zed Attack Proxy are all available with one click configurations.
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Optimize Cloud Costs

Manage cloud services to eliminate waste and ensure that appropriate resources are allocated.

Cloud Cost Management

Multi Policy Evaluation Downloads - Now with multi-policy evaluations, you can download a CSV or JSON file for the evaluations. When needing to export CCM’s reporting or evaluations on Asset Governance, this can be a useful feature.

Native User Approval in Commitment Orchestrator - Commitments with cloud providers for example can come in the form of commitments to Reserved Instances. Now we have made it even easier to endorse or reject commitment recommendations through native user approval, providing greater control and interaction.

Revamped Asset Governance Overview - Cloud assets because of their elastic and ephemeral nature can be hard to keep track of. A suite of new UI capabilities are helping make cloud asset governance easier. Enhancements include time frame specific savings, resource counts for recommendations, and trending visualizations for daily evaluations.

All Release Notes

All release notes can be found on Harness Developer Hub (HDH). The release notes are inclusive of new features and bug fixes across the Harness Platform. You can sign up for RSS Alerts for specific modules on HDH.