Harness Product Update | July 2021

July was, as per usual, a busy month here at Harness! We’re super excited about an announcement that’s coming soon. Keep your 👀  peeled near the start of August for great news about how we’ll help cut bill shock out of your life. But for now, let's keep focused on the July 2021 product update.

We’ve been hard at work bringing you new features, helpful articles, and a new eBook. This month’s eBook, written by Technical Evangelist Ravi Lachhman, was on the developer experience and how important it is - even in CI/CD. Get it here: One Developer Experience — Build, Deploy, & Experiment.

New Features

SDKs for Feature Flags

Hot on the heels of our announcement of Harness Feature Flags, we now have two new server-side SDKs available for Feature Flags: Python and .NET. For a full list of SDKs we support, see below!

Harness University

New Modules and Courses: 

We have new courses now available at Harness University.

• Introduction to Continuous Integration (CI): This course introduces basic CI concepts, walks through tooling currently available, and why Harness is a great choice to take your development teams forward. 
• Introduction to Harness CI Community (Drone): This course introduces Drone and walks through setting up your first CI pipeline.  
• We also have some Getting Started Courses available:
• Getting Started: Harness Manager and Delegates: This course introduces the Harness Manager and Delegates and walks through installation and best practices. 
• Getting Started: Harness Connections: This course walks through setting up Harness with different Cloud Providers, Source Repositories, Collaboration Tools, and Verification Providers. 
• Getting Started: Harness Custom Dashboards: This course walks through DORA metrics and widgets Harness has to build dashboards. 

HarnessU Live:

• August 23rd and 24th 2021: Harness Fundamentals, 8-11 am PST.
• August 25th and 26th 2021: Harness Administration, 8-11 am PST.

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

Notable Mentions in the Press

• Ravi Lachmann, Technical Evangelist, featured in:
• Jaxenter.com: 10 Benefits of CI/CD for your DevOps Journey
• DevOps Digest: 8 Ways CI/CD Pipelines Are Evolving, Part 1 
• DevOps Digest: 8 Ways CI/CD Pipelines Are Evolving, Part 2 
• DevOps.com: 8 Security Considerations for CI/CD, Part 1
• DevOps.com: 8 Security Considerations for CI/CD, Part 2
• TechBeacon: 5 CI/CD Challenges—and How to Solve Them

Upcoming Events

• August Tasting Events - Throughout August
• TopGolf Atlanta - August 5th
• SkilUP Days DevSecOps - August 12th
• AWS Public Sector Summit - September 28 - 29th

Looking Ahead

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

• Robust Dashboarding Capabilities - We are looking for early adopters who are interested in building custom dashboards with our new custom dashboard interface. The new interface will provide more visualization and customization options along with the ability to set alerts and download the dashboard data. Shoot us an email if you'd like to participate!
• Azure Devops Repo Support - We have added the support for Azure Devops as a Git repository. With this, users can now sync their Harness entities to/from Azure Git repos automatically when you make changes in the Harness UI or push your changes to a Git repo.
• Dashboard Enhancements - Users can now easily compare what versions of their services have been deployed to QA and Production environments from the Services page. This not only helps users see what versions of their services are available in each of these environments, but also helps easily identify (visually) services in their production environments that are lagging behind their QA environments.
• Event Notifications - 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.
• Deployment Freeze - Based on the feedback received from our early adopters, we have enhanced the deployment freeze capability to support:
• Ad-hoc windows (Users can now 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) can now make sure that mission-critical deployments happen even when there is a freeze).
• 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.
• Granular Access Control - We are adding more granular access control to restrict access to specific workflows, pipelines, and application templates.