Harness Expands Chaos Engineering Resiliency Features with Integrated Continuous Delivery

Harness Chaos Engineering (CE) has expanded its chaos fault library and delivered native integration with the Harness Continuous Delivery (CD) module, enabling developers and SREs to test the reliability and resilience of applications in software delivery pipelines to improve velocity and minimize the risk of unplanned downtime. 

As enterprises increasingly turn to cloud-native applications to keep pace with the speed of innovation and meet customers’ expectations for reliability, developers can rapidly release code multiple times per day. With these rapid changes, complexity mounts, and teams develop a lack of understanding into how systems behave, leading to technical debt, drifting reliability metrics, and business risk.

Chaos engineering enables teams to prevent the unforeseen downtime and risk that can result from the complexity of cloud-native environments. With chaos engineering, developers test scenarios that could potentially bring an application down without impacting development speed.

“Chaos engineering is the future of reliability and resiliency testing. It’s the best way to ensure applications are pressure tested against all kinds of possible scenarios, from disaster recovery to handling traffic spikes,” said Uma Mukkara, Head of Chaos Engineering at Harness. “Bringing these capabilities into the Harness Software Delivery Platform makes it even easier for customers to implement chaos engineering without slowing down development, increase developer productivity by improving system architecture understanding, and reduce time spent responding to production incidents. This will greatly help businesses reduce the risk of unplanned downtime and continue delivering exceptional customer experiences.”

Incorporating Resilience Best Practices with Harness Chaos Engineering

With Harness Chaos Engineering, organizations can adopt, scale, and automate software resilience best practices without negatively impacting velocity or requiring custom tooling and complex integrations. Harness CE identifies weak points within controlled systems-level experiments and equips developer and SRE teams with the information needed to prevent failures from happening in the future. 

Harness CE, a cloud-native solution built on the open-source LitmusChaos project, enables enterprises to automate chaos experiments in the CI/CD pipeline with guardrails and resilience scoring, a quantitative measure of how resilient the target environment is when the respective chaos experiment is performed on it. As a result, deployments can be automatically rolled back if reliability issues are detected. With Harness CE’s industry-leading capabilities, enterprises can build a reliable and resilient practice in days, not years.

To get started with CE, developers can create a trial account and follow simple tutorials to install, test reliability, and build resilience into the software delivery pipeline.

New Chaos Faults Expand Test Capabilities to Serverless Applications

The Chaos Engineering Enterprise ChaosHub has been expanded to 92 chaos faults that test the resilience of VMware, AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, and serverless systems. 

As businesses adopt serverless architecture, the addition of six AWS Lambda chaos faults test the resilience of serverless processes when they fail. This helps developers understand if proper error handling is in place and/or if auto-recovery of failed transactions has been implemented.

These faults include:

• Delete Event Source Mapping
• Delete Function Concurrence  
• Toggle Event Mapping State
• Update Function Memory
• Update Function Timeout
• Update Role Permission

As IT outages reveal failure modes and new technology is adopted, Harness continues to expand its chaos fault library to ensure its customers can build resilience into their software delivery pipelines.

Building Reliable Software with Resilience Engineering

Harness CE helps enterprises achieve Continuous Resilience^TM, which ensures collaboration among all stakeholders of the software delivery lifecycle through the integration of Chaos Engineering with CD. As the only chaos engineering solution with native CD integration, Harness CE enables teams to maintain velocity while reducing downtime.

SREs, QA Engineers, and developers can quickly incorporate chaos experiments into their CD pipelines to continuously test and validate that their systems will maintain performance during a disruption.

Organizations can leverage Harness Chaos Engineering to:

• Improve Developer Productivity by empowering developers to innovate and create rather than getting distracted by incidents. 
• Accelerate Digital Transformation to stay ahead of competition by driving innovation without disrupting business growth. With a deeper understanding of systems behavior, new technology and processes can be implemented more efficiently. 
• Improve Customer Experience by ensuring systems are highly available and performant with faster response to outages.
• Avoid Disasters by understanding how systems handle failure. 

Start Building Software Resilience Today with Harness 

This native CD platform integration is the culmination of Harness’s acquisition of ChaosNative Inc. and a major expansion of the Harness Software Delivery Platform. Customers can deploy each module independently with their existing tooling or use all of the Harness modules together to build a powerful, unified modern software delivery pipeline that spans Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), Feature Flags, Cloud Cost Management, Site Reliability Management (SRM), Security Testing Orchestration (STO), and Chaos Engineering. 

If you are ready to see how your organization can adopt this practice and improve reliability, request a demo and sign up for the SaaS trial today!