Harness Cloud: The Ultimate Managed Build Infrastructure for Fast, Secure CI

Harness Cloud is a fully managed Continuous Integration (CI) platform that allows teams to run builds on Harness-managed virtual machines (VMs) pre-configured with tools, packages, and settings typically used in CI pipelines. In this blog, we'll dive into the four core pillars of Harness Cloud: Speed, Governance, Reliability, and Security. By the end of this post, you'll understand how Harness Cloud streamlines your CI process, saves time, ensures better governance, and provides reliable, secure builds for your development teams.

Faster Builds

Harness Cloud delivers blazing-fast builds on multiple platforms, including Linux, macOS, Windows, and mobile operating systems. With Harness Cloud, your builds run in isolation on pre-configured VMs managed by Harness. This means you don’t have to waste time setting up or maintaining your infrastructure. Harness handles the heavy lifting, allowing you to focus on writing code instead of waiting for builds to complete.

The speed of your CI pipeline is crucial for agile development, and Harness Cloud gives you just that—quick, efficient builds that scale according to your needs. With starter pipelines available for various programming languages, you can get up and running quickly without having to customize your environment.

Streamlined Governance

One of the most critical aspects of any enterprise CI/CD process is governance. With Harness Cloud, you can rest assured that your builds are running in a controlled environment. Harness Cloud makes it easier to manage your build infrastructure with centralized configurations and a clear, auditable process. This improves visibility and reduces the complexity of managing your CI pipelines.

Harness also gives you access to the latest features as soon as they’re rolled out. This early access enables teams to stay ahead of the curve, trying out new functionality without worrying about maintaining the underlying infrastructure. By using Harness Cloud, you're ensuring that your team is always using the latest CI innovations.

Reliable and Scalable Infrastructure

Reliability is paramount when it comes to build systems. With Harness Cloud, you can trust that your builds are running smoothly and consistently. Harness manages, maintains, and updates the virtual machines (VMs), so you don't have to worry about patching, system failures, or hardware-related issues. This hands-off approach reduces the risk of downtime and builds interruptions, ensuring that your development process is as seamless as possible.

By using Harness-managed infrastructure, you gain the peace of mind that comes with a fully supported, reliable platform. Whether you're running a handful of builds or thousands, Harness ensures they’re executed with the same level of reliability and uptime.

Robust Security

Security is at the forefront of Harness Cloud. With Harness managing your build infrastructure, you don't need to worry about the complexities of securing your own build machines. Harness ensures that all the necessary security protocols are in place to protect your code and the environment in which it runs.

​Harness Cloud's commitment to security includes achieving SLSA Level 3 compliance, which ensures the integrity of the software supply chain by generating and verifying provenance for build artifacts. This compliance is achieved through features like isolated build environments and strict access controls, ensuring each build runs in a secure, tamper-proof environment.

For details, read the blog An In-depth Look at Achieving SLSA Level-3 Compliance with Harness.

Harness Cloud also enables secure connectivity to on-prem services and tools, allowing teams to safely integrate with self-hosted artifact repositories, source control systems, and other critical infrastructure. By leveraging Secure Connect, Harness ensures that these connections are encrypted and controlled, eliminating the need to expose internal resources to the public internet. This provides a seamless and secure way to incorporate on-prem dependencies into your CI workflows without compromising security.

Next Steps

Harness Cloud makes it easy to run and scale your CI pipelines without the headache of managing infrastructure. By focusing on the four pillars—speed, governance, reliability, and security—Harness ensures that your development pipeline runs efficiently and securely.

Harness CI and Harness Cloud give you:

✅ Blazing-fast builds—8X faster than traditional CI solutions

✅ A unified platform—Run builds on any language, any OS, including mobile

✅ Native SCM—Harness Code Repository is free and comes packed with built-in governance & security

If you're ready to experience a fully managed, high-performance CI environment, give Harness Cloud a try today.