August 2023 Product Updates

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.

Continuous Delivery & GitOps

• You can now edit Git details after the pipeline is configured and saved. This can be very useful in Git Experience workflows. For example, this enables you to move your YAML configs from one location to another in your Git configs repositories.

Full Continuous Delivery & GitOps Release Notes

Continuous Integration

• Eliminate unnecessary connection tests for GitHub connectors: Harness has updated how it handles connection tests for your GitHub connectors. Before, it would continually test connections even if they kept failing, which could be problematic.
• What's new and why this change is beneficial: a. If a test fails due to incorrect GitHub credentials, Harness will stop the tests. b. This avoids needless testing and can prevent issues like account lockouts, especially when a connector's access token is tied to an individual user's account. c. In simple terms, Harness is smarter about knowing when to stop trying a connection, saving resources and potential account troubles. d. This change makes managing connections more efficient and less prone to problems.

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Full Continuous Integration Release Notes

Feature Flags

• Feature Flags UI: When specifying percentages for a rollout, the UI now provides feedback while you edit to let you know the percentage that requires assignment.

Full Feature Flags Release Notes

Cloud Cost Management

• AWS AutoStopping proxy enhancement: You can now select the subnet ID from the dropdown list for AWS AutoStopping proxy creation.
  

• Auto Stopping page UI enhancement: The page on which users select either a load balancer or an AutoStopping Proxy has been enhanced to include an additional API that retrieves information about proxies created previously in shared VPCs. Now users can use a proxy created in a shared VPC across projects and connectors.
• Overview page UI enhancement: a. The pie chart now shows a hover state. b. The forecast trend in the widget has been removed c. Added forecast time period in the forecast cost widget d. Changed the heading of the cloud cost widget from Top AWS Accounts to Top 10 AWS accounts.
• Recommendations page UI enhancement: The Include dropdown on the Recommendations page has been removed. Instead, the following toggle options have been added in the Filter panel as shown in the screenshots below:
  

Full Cloud Cost Management Release Notes

^{Chaos Engineering}

• Now supports Universal Base Images (UBI) in chaos components.
• Improved safety: Users can't edit or delete scheduled chaos experiments if the linked system isn't active.
• New storage option for keys and tokens: a. Choose between Config Maps or Secrets on the execution plane. b. Useful for storing connection details, authentication, and running experiments.

Full Chaos Engineering Release Notes

Internal Developer Portal (IDP)

• Internal Developer Portal (IDP) Plugin Updates: a. Added the Confluence search plugin to retrieve results from Confluence spaces. b. Introduced the Harness Feature Flags plugin. c. Launched an updated Harness CI/CD plugin. d. Features new annotation support. e. Enables filtering of pipelines across projects and organizations.
• Polling Updates for Software Catalog: IDP now checks linked Git repositories every 15 minutes, up from the previous 5-minute interval.
• IDP Catalog API Access: Use the Harness X-API-Key to interact with the IDP catalog APIs.
• Software Template Changes: The `trigger:harness-custom-pipeline` action in the `template.yaml` file is now synchronized with pipeline activity: a. It continues to run and displays the ongoing pipeline status. b. With the synchronous nature of `trigger:harness-custom-pipeline`, it's possible to use the `catalog:register` action in a template to register the `catalog-info.yaml` of the newly created software component.

Full Internal Developer Platform Notes

Software Engineering Insights

• Baselines: Users now have the ability to define a baseline and have a trend line for the custom table report.
  

• Trellis Scores: Users now have the ability to view the Trellis scores for different intervals as a 'Public Dashboard' user and 'Org Admin' user.
• Pipeline Support Update: Support for Azure DevOps Release pipelines.
• Custom Reporting: Ability to render the Executive Insights widget as a custom report using propels.
• Widgets: Drill-down support for single stat for Lead Time in Stages widget.
  

Platform

Here are some important improvements to our platform that should enhance your user experience:

• Delegate Selection Updates: Delegate selection logs now show the following: DelegateId, DelegateName, Hostname.
• Go Library Upgrade: Updated from version 1.20.4 to 1.20.5.
• Harness AIDA Integration: a. Introduced "Ask AIDA", an AI-driven chatbot for Harness Docs. b. Access AIDA by clicking the icon at the bottom-right of the screen.
• Delegate Logs for Connectors: View delegate logs while validating a connector that uses a delegate connection.
• OAUTH Improvements: For accounts with Oauth enabled: Auto-acceptance of invites is now available, even if using password-based authentication.
• Username Restrictions: Usernames are limited to 256 characters.
• List Tokens API Enhancements: a. Ability to view all personal access tokens or service account tokens in an account. For those with user management permissions: List all personal access tokens, Filter tokens by user or show only active tokens. c. For those with service account management permissions: List all service account tokens, Filter tokens by service account or show only active tokens.

Full Platform Release Notes

Delegate

• Delegate Connectors: The Splunk connector has been enhanced to include support for Bearer Token.
• Delegate Execution Logs: Enhanced Execution Logs with added details: Duration, Task ID, Additional information useful for understanding and troubleshooting CV Steps, SRM Live monitoring, and SLI.
• Delegate Manual Query mode: In manual Query mode, the Datadog Metrics Health source now provides support for formulas.
• Error Messages: Health source provider error messages are now included in API responses, enhancing user experience and making debugging more efficient.
• Azure API Update: New API, getAzureKeyVaultClient, available: a. Fetches the list of Azure vaults. b. Speeds up the time for Harness to display a recently created Azure vault.

Full Delegate Release Notes

Self-Managed Enterprise Edition

• New Database support: Harness now supports external self-managed databases for high availability.

Full Self Managed Enterprise Release Notes

Early Access

Platform

• Harness AI Development Assistant Launch (Beta Feature): Harness has introduced the "Harness AI Development Assistant (AIDA)" to transform software delivery processes.
• Purpose and Functionality: a. Merges AI capabilities with established DevOps tools and practices. b. Streamlines and hastens the software development lifecycle. c. Enables teams to release high-quality applications swiftly and effectively. d. Features AI-driven predictive analytics, continuous verification, and advanced release orchestration.
• Key Benefits of Harness AIDA: a. Auto-recognition of failures in pipelines: The root cause analysis (RCA) option generates recommendations for step failures in pipelines. b. Asset governance: The asset governance feature assists you in drafting rules that are based on your requirements and aligned with your governance goals. c. Security: Harness AI identifies security vulnerabilities, describes them, and suggests remediation.
  

Continuous Delivery

• Blue Green Deployments: Added a new field in the release history for Blue Green deployments to differentiate between environmentsYou’ll need to enable the CDS_BG_STAGE_SCALE_DOWN_STEP_NG to use this feature.
• Scheduled automatic approvals have been added to manual approval steps: This functionality is behind a feature flag, CDS_AUTO_APPROVAL. You can configure a manual approval step to automatically approve at a specific date and time.
• Docker Artifact Digest Support: Digest support was added for Nexus 3, Github, and Artifactory artifact sources.This feature is behind the feature flag CD_NG_DOCKER_ARTIFACT_DIGEST.
  

Continuous Integration

• Using Output Variables as Environment Variables in Build Stages: A new feature allows output variables from one step to be used directly as environment variables in subsequent steps within the same Build (CI) stage. How to Activate: Turn on the feature using the CI_OUTPUT_VARIABLES_AS_ENV flag. Practical Example: In a Build stage with three sequential steps, an output from the first step can be directly utilized in the second and third steps. Easy Reference: With the feature active, you can use an output variable just by its name. For instance, MY_VAR from an earlier step can be accessed as $MY_VAR in later steps. Without this feature: You'd need to use a more complicated expression like <+steps.stepID.output.outputVariables.MY_VAR> to refer to the variable.
• Cache Intelligence UI update: You can enable Cache Intelligence in the Pipeline Studio's Visual editor. Previously, you could only enable Cache Intelligence through the YAML editor. a. The Enable Cache Intelligence UI field is behind the feature flag CI_CACHE_INTELLIGENCE b. For more information on this feature, go to the documentation on Output variables.

Cloud Cost Management

• Propagate force cool down: You can now propagate force cool down from primary rule to dependent rules. Earlier, when stopping a rule from the UI, you had to stop its dependent rules one by one. With this enhancement, you can propagate the stop operation to dependent rules as well.

Security Testing Orchestration

• Dynamic target baselines: You can now define dynamic target baselines using regular expressions. Dynamic baselines more accurately reflect the current "root" element in the context of a real-world software development life cycle.This feature is behind the Feature Flag STO_BASELINE_REGEX.

Full Early Access Release Notes

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