Harness Product Update | August 2021

August was a pretty big month at Harness - is it just me, or do we say that a lot? 🥴 In August, we announced a massive update to CCM that resulted in intelligent cloud cost management. What does that mean? We’re glad you asked! Here’s a quick recap on CCM’s new features:

• Automatically shuts down idle VMs and containers, and dynamically runs them on spot instances with no interruptions, reducing costs by up to 75%. 
• Provides deep Kubernetes cost visibility and root cost analysis, and recommends ways to optimize idle/unallocated cloud spend, making containers a first-class citizen in cloud cost management.
• Intelligently achieves cost attribution, showback, and chargeback by mapping organizational hierarchies to teams and projects with a modern BI experience, ultimately driving accountability.

To learn more, head on over to Bhargav’s blog post: Introducing Intelligent Cloud Cost Management.
We also figured this would be a good time to release v2 of the Cloud Cost Management Buyer’s Guide, an eBook that tells you all you need to know about cloud cost management tools, including where products are strong and where they need improvements. It’s a great tool to compare vendors and figure out which will best meet your needs. As part of the revamp, we changed our rating scale and updated features on products where necessary.

New Features

CD - Publish Events to an HTTP Endpoint 

Users can now get event notifications about their deployment pipelines to any logging tool of their choice. They can set up events to be sent when the pipeline begins, completes, or pauses during execution to any webhook endpoint. This will help users gain better visibility over their entire DevOps process. The events can also be managed with GraphQL APIs.

CD - API Support for Approvals

Harness users can now easily approve or reject their deployment pipeline with APIs. This will help automate the approval process and reduce the overall lead time. Users don't have to access the UI to manually approve/reject pipelines.

Harness University

New Modules and Courses: 

Current Generation Cloud Cost Management Learning Path: 

• Introduction to Cloud Cost Management - This module introduces Cloud Cost Intelligence, describes ways it can help organizations get visibility into their Cloud costs and walk through different tools existing cloud providers offer.
• Getting Started: Harness Cloud Cost Management - This module introduces Harness' Current Generation Cloud Cost Management Module and shows you how to get your environment connected to start seeing cost insights.
• Getting Started: Harness Perspectives and Budgets - This module introduces Budgets and Perspectives available in the Harness Cloud Cost Management Module.

HarnessU Live:

• September 13th and 14th 2021: Harness Fundamentals, 6-9 am PST.
• August 15th and 16th 2021: Harness Administration, 6-9 am PST.

To register for August and beyond, view our Live Events calendar. 

Notable Mentions in the Press

• Ravi Lachhman, Technical Evangelist:
• The New Stack: Developer Experience: Devs Shouldn’t Have to “Figure It Out”
• SD Times Podcast: The Challenges and Benefits of Continuous Delivery
• Product Mentions:
• The New Stack: Harness Cost Transparency Could Slash Runaway Cloud Bills
• SiliconANGLE: Software delivery startup Harness adds cloud cost management tools 
• DevOps.com: Harness Updates Cloud Cost Control Tool for DevOps Teams
• AiThority: Harness Cloud Cost Management Features Save Customers 75%
• TFiR: Harness’ Cloud Cost Management Features Save Customers 75% In Cloud Costs

Upcoming Events

• TopGolf Events - Charlotte, NC, September 9th & Schaumberg, IL, September 30th
• SkilUp Observability - September 23rd
• AWS Public Sector Summit - September 28 - 29th 
• AWS Harness Afterparty - September 28th

Upcoming Webinars

• Using AI/ML to Automate CI/CD with Harness CTO, Nick Durkin - September 2nd
• Continuous Integration Demo - September 9th
• More module demos and dates to come!

Looking Ahead

In the next few weeks/months, here’s what’s coming at ya: 

CD

• Deployment Freeze - Based on the feedback received from our early adopters, we are enhancing the deployment freeze capability to support:
• Ad-hoc windows (Users will be able to easily set up freeze windows to stop deployments for the next 2 hours while doing critical demos).
• Recurring windows (Easily set up freeze windows to avoid deployments from happening when the team is not around - no more weekend  deployments).
• Override a freeze window when you need to hotfix (Super admins (heroes) will be able to make sure that mission-critical deployments happen even when there is a freeze).
• Support to Control the Rollback Order in Pre-Deployment Steps - Multiple customers have requested the ability to control the rollback order in pre-deployment steps. This will increase the manageability of their deployments. We’ve heard you loud and clear and are working to enable this shortly!
• Ability to Access Deployment.yaml - Customers would now like to do the same thing against the deployment.yaml for Kubernetes deployments. They need access to the deployment.yaml to pass it to the scanner before the K8s deployment. Coming soon!
• Support for Harness Variables Inside Kustomize - Users will now be able to define and use the harness variables inside Kustomize. 
• CLI7 - Improvements to CF Command to support CLI7 will be made in the coming weeks.

FF

• Pipelines - Coming soon! We’ll be enabling pipelines for feature flags in mid-Q3.
• Git Sync - Will be offered at the end of Q3.
• Node SDK - Keep your eyes peeled in late Q3 for this new SDK!

CCM

• Intelligent Cloud AutoStopping - In the coming weeks, expect support for Intelligent Cloud AutoStopping for Kubernetes on AWS, Azure, and GCP. 
• Perspectives - We’ll be adding Perspectives with Anomalies, Recommendations, Forecasts, and Budgets.
• Anomaly Detection - Support for Anomaly Detection for Azure will be enabled shortly. 
• GCP Support - Expect support for GCP on our brand new redesign of Cloud Cost Management to be enabled soon.