Announcing Self-Service Getting Started for Industry’s First Enterprise GitOps-as-a-Service

Harness GitOps is the industry’s first Enterprise GitOps-as-a-Service solution that removes the toil of creating and managing complex GitOps control planes. We announced the general availability of this offering in September 2022. Since then, we have made enormous strides in enabling fast-moving DevOps and platform engineering organizations to deliver GitOps-powered internal developer platforms to their developers. Today we are excited to take this journey even further by announcing complete self-service getting started for Harness GitOps. You can come on this journey along with us by either:

1) Registering for CI/CD DevDays Workshop: Go hands-on with Harness GitOps, receiving expert instruction by registering for our hands-on workshop.

2) Sign up for Harness CD & GitOps Free plan: Get started with Harness GitOps using an intuitive Get Started user experience.

2) Or scheduling a Demo: Witness firsthand the power of Harness GitOps. Schedule a demo with our experts and see how Harness can elevate your deployment processes.

The rest of this post highlights the importance of GitOps and the unique value additions that Harness GitOps provides.

Understanding GitOps: The Software Delivery Factory

In the dynamic world of software development, the quest for efficiency, reliability, and speed is never-ending. GitOps is a key milestone in this quest where the precision and efficiency of factory automation is applied to software deployment. Imagine each deployment as a meticulously orchestrated assembly line where goal-driven robots (agents) work tirelessly to ensure every piece of code is precisely where it needs to be. In this analogy:

• The Agent: In the world of Harness GitOps, the agent is like a goal-driven robot, continuously monitoring and updating the desired state of the system based on the configurations defined in the Git repository. This ensures a synchronized, reliable, and efficient deployment process.
• ArgoCD or Flux as the Kubernetes Operator: ArgoCD or Flux steps in as the robotic implementers, constantly comparing the actual state of the system with the desired state and taking necessary actions to align them. It's the muscle behind the operation, ensuring that the applications and infrastructure resources are managed effectively.
• Git as the Logbook: Git acts as the centralized logbook, recording every change, every decision, and every modification. This not only ensures traceability and compliance but also enhances collaboration and version control, making the entire process transparent and auditable.

The Harness Difference: Elevating Developer Experience

Harness GitOps is a paradigm-shifting approach that makes it easy to incorporate GitOps into your software delivery workflows. It reduces the tedium of manually creating and approving pull requests for routine promotions, watching deployment health, and building orchestration to connect GitOps deployments to quality checks. Here's how Harness GitOps is changing the game:

1. Comprehensive Pipeline Automation

Harness doesn't stop at deploying an artifact to a cluster; it extends to orchestrate across the entire delivery pipeline. This means integrating both human and automated sections of the deployment process, from code commit to production deployment, including orchestrating testing and security scans. With managed ArgoCD and Flux infrastructure and a full-featured deployment pipeline, Harness GitOps ensures a scalable, fully automated path to delivery.

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2. Centralized GitOps UI

Harness offers centralized dashboards across multiple ArgoCD and Flux deployments, providing a single pane of glass for managing and monitoring application deployments across any number of clusters and environments. This centralized visibility simplifies management, enhances collaboration, and ensures consistent governance and compliance across all deployments.

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3. Robust Rollbacks and Remediation

With robust rollback and remediation capabilities, Harness ensures that your system can quickly recover from failures and maintain high availability. Harness will detect problems in the environment caused by the deployment, stop progressive delivery, and initiate rollbacks. This is crucial in maintaining the integrity and reliability of your deployment process while minimizing the chore of watching health dashboards as rollouts occur. 

4. Orchestration Across Environments

Harness allows you to orchestrate deployments across multiple environments, ensuring consistent and controlled promotion of artifacts. The visual interface makes it easy to define the sequence of steps and dependencies, simplifying complex deployment workflows.

5. GitOps for Infrastructure-as-Code, Feature Flags and More

Harness ensures that you can use GitOps approaches throughout your DevOps activities. For example, when there’s a proposed change to infrastructure, the Infrastructure as Code Management module will decorate the pull request with information about what infrastructure will be impacted and how that will change cloud costs. Feature flag setting can be managed in Git, and Harness will generate PRs to remove stale flags. Teams using Harness Chaos Engineering can manage their experiments through GitOps gestures as well. 

6. Self-Service Onboarding

Harness makes it easy to get started with GitOps. Between excellent documentation and a guided onboarding experience, it’s easy to try Harness. 

7. ArgoCD or Flux

The two major reconcilers for GitOps on Kubernetes are ArgoCD and Flux. They each have their proponents and certain advantages. In large organizations, there are often teams with each. Harness offers you the most flexibility, with support for both ArgoCD and Flux. Core Harness capabilities work the same for each, and special capabilities like ArgoCD Rollouts are exposed so that you can take advantage of the best capabilities of your chosen reconciler.

For Developers and Managers: A Unified Solution

Harness GitOps is designed with both the developer and manager in mind. Developers enjoy the ease of use and the power to handle complex deployment scenarios, while managers appreciate the visibility, control, and assurance of compliance that Harness provides. It's a tool that not only simplifies the deployment process but also ensures that it aligns with the organization's broader goals and standards.

Embrace the Future of DevOps with Harness

Harness GitOps is not just a step forward in your DevOps journey; it's a leap towards operational excellence. By embracing the power of advanced GitOps with Harness, you can redefine what's possible in software deployment. Whether you're looking to streamline your workflow or oversee large-scale operations effectively, Harness GitOps is the solution you need.