Now Generally Available: Harness GitOps-as-a-Service Delivers Scalability, Control, and Security to Enterprises

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Harness GitOps-as-a-Service provides enterprises with the scalability, security, and governance needed for GitOps deployments. Built on Argo CD or Flux, it offers seamless integration, centralized management, and enterprise-grade controls, ensuring reliable and secure application delivery. The solution simplifies the orchestration of complex deployments, providing visibility and compliance through features like policy as code, audit trails, and role-based access controls.

Today we are announcing the general availability of fully managed Harness GitOps-as-a-Service bringing enterprise controls to GitOps deployments with governance, reliability, and visibility at scale.

Developers face the growing complexity of application development in microservices architecture with the demand for even more frequent application deployments. GitOps uses Git — the most widely-used modern version control system in the world today — as the single source of truth for container-based continuous integration and continuous deployment, allowing development teams to increase velocity and improve system reliability. However, most existing GitOps solutions today lack the controls, visibility, security, and scalability required by enterprise customers.

Harness GitOps-as-a-Service, built on the popular Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)-incubated open source Argo CD project, delivers the lightning fast deployments and lightweight operation developers love and takes it to the next level with enterprise-grade security, governance, and scale.

GitOps-as-a-Service Improves Developer Experience with the Scalability and Control DevOps Teams Require

GitOps is becoming increasingly popular by offering a developer-friendly deployment solution. Customers have told us that traditional GitOps implementations are simple to set up, but managing a volume of implementations at scale is difficult.

To make GitOps easier, more secure, and more manageable for our enterprise customers, we’re making our hosted GitOps-as-a-Service solution generally available as a part of the Harness Software Delivery Platform.

“GitOps is becoming the industry paradigm for continuous software delivery, providing a solution for developers who have struggled to identify a frictionless deployment solution,” said Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder at Harness. "While many organizations like the convenience of GitOps and Argo, they must meet security and governance requirements that Argo does not provide,Harness GitOps-as-a-Service delivers on our promise to provide the most comprehensive CD solution available to developers, including security, governance, and scalability without tradeoff.”

Built for the Needs of the Enterprise

GitOps, often seen as a way to orchestrate the “last mile” of a deployment, hasn’t historically catered to the requirements of the enterprise. In response to this need, Harness GitOps-as-a-Service offers a world-class developer experience along with the required enterprise security and governance controls to deploy applications faster. All this comes with complete visibility into deployments and the ability to manage a volume of deployments at enterprise-class scale.

Here are a few key areas that make Harness CD & GitOps unique:

Governance

Harness provides enterprise-grade security and control, giving anyone the ability to enforce governance. Teams can drive their own software delivery processes with the confidence that they are adhering to all compliance standards and security policies.

This approach includes:

Policy as Code with Harness’s OPA (Open Policy Agent) integration allows organizations to create, manage, and enforce policies across software delivery processes, governing pipelines, and deployments.
Audit trails that allow everyone to track and review events in a single location, so there’s never a question of “what changed and when,” ensuring that organizations stay compliant and are stress-free in the event of an audit.
Fine-grained role-based access controls (RBAC) that make it easy to customize and manage who has access to perform specific actions across an organization.
Unified Single Sign-On (SSO) across different deployments improves your overall security posture, helps keep you compliant, and improves usability by saving developers’ time.

Deploy with Confidence at Scale

Harness GitOps-as-a-Service makes it easy to scale across an organization because the entire set up process can be orchestrated in a declarative manner. The addition of pull request pipelines makes it easy to propagate changes across multiple services and environments without having to individually manage each deployment by adding a layer of pipeline orchestration on top of standard GitOps deployments.

Because GitOps can be orchestrated using pipelines, users have access to additional features like continuous verification, automated rollbacks, and service reliability management. These guardrails let developers deploy changes confidently without the risk of causing application downtime.

Centralized Visibility and Management

Harness provides a centralized GitOps control center that allows teams to manage and view all deployments across multiple environments. Teammates can drill down into granular service and environment details to check the status of services and monitor deployment health. If someone needs more data than what is provided, Harness makes it easy to create custom Looker dashboards and visualize multiple tables or graphs in one place, so you can get a quick view of related services and deployment health without switching tabs.

Flexible

GitOps-as-a-Service lets developers start with a hosted Argo CD solution or they can bring their own Argo CD instances. If a developer has already spent the time and effort to set up Argo CD, GitOps-as-a-Service allows them to get started in the Harness platform and gain the additional governance and scalability needed for the enterprise. Haven’t started on the GitOps journey yet? Great, GitOps-as-a-Service makes it easy to get started quickly without causing a scalability problem down the road.

We’re excited to see what you do with Harness GitOps-as-a-Service and will continue to iterate and improve each day.

How to get started

For those of you who are interested in getting hands-on with GitOps-as-a-Service, here’s how to get started.

Harness provides native GitOps functionality that syncs Kubernetes manifests with target clusters using Harness.

To begin, you will set up GitOps-as-a-Service by installing a GitOps Agent in your environment and then defining the desired and target state in a GitOps Application in Harness. Alternatively, you can import your existing Argo CD instances to skip this step. The GitOps Agent performs sync operations and reacts to events in the source and target states.

All the entities required for an application live under the Settings tab.

Once you have completed the prerequisites, you can start using GitOps-as-a-Service.

Let’s get a look at some of our built-in reporting capabilities.

In the screenshot below, we are showing a resource map providing visibility into the sync and health status of all of the different resource kinds involved in a single deployment. Users are able to drill down into any individual resource to view its manifest details and identify drift.