Harness Launches Source Available Continuous Delivery

No Red Tape. No Barriers to Entry.

As companies switched to Kubernetes and microservices, Harness created the first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service solution to tackle modern software delivery. Harness has helped enterprises and small businesses deploy faster with more confidence by abstracting away the complexity of new technologies. Now we are bringing our world-class CD pipelines to users through a source available license. Our goal is to remove the barriers that prevent developers from experiencing our platform.

Developers at large enterprises who have faced hours of security reviews, executive meetings, and internal negotiation to get approval to start using Harness CD can bypass bureaucracy and get straight to deploying. 

Teams at smaller companies who needed to deploy software without committing to an enterprise contract can build and deploy their first pipeline in roughly 15 minutes. 

Tinkerers who want to try the latest and greatest software on their own machines have an easy way to evaluate Harness CD.  

The Harness CD Community Edition is provided under a source available license called Polyform Shield License, which is available for use free of charge for most users. We have open source technologies, like Drone, and plan to share more code via open source in the future. If you’d like to find out more about our commitment to open source check out our website.

Harness CD Community Edition

Harness CD Community Edition joins existing enterprise editions of our Continuous Delivery product. The first iteration is only available for Kubernetes (on any platform), and in the near future, AWS (EC2, ECS, ASG, CloudFormation, Lambda, etc.), Azure (VMSS, WebApps, AKS, ACR, ARM, Blueprint), .NET, Google Cloud Build, VMware Tanzu, & Serverless deployments will be supported. Users will have access to Harness CD’s staple of features such as automated canary & blue-green deployments, automated infrastructure provisioning, integrated approval & notification flows, and a developer-friendly pipeline-as-code experience. Harness CD Community Edition also comes with built-in user and secrets management along with built-in approval workflows. 

The Harness CD Community Edition can be downloaded and run on your laptop or VM with 3 GB of RAM and 2 CPUs. Once downloaded, a streamlined quick start guide will help you create and deploy a pipeline in 15 minutes. Harness CD Community Edition users can upgrade to a paid plan at any time. 

How to Install, Build, and Deploy a Pipeline

Harness CD Community Edition can be found on GitHub.

Before using Harness CD Community Edition, you’ll need to either have Docker Desktop installed or have a Kubernetes cluster where you can install a Helm chart. For this post, we are going to use the Docker Desktop option. In the Resources tab of your Docker Desktop, increase memory by 3 GB RAM and CPUs by 2 CPUs. After installing Harness CD, you can deploy microservices to any Kubernetes cluster as long as you have network connectivity to that cluster. The easiest option would be to enable the built-in Kubernetes cluster that ships with Docker Desktop while making sure you allocate additional memory and CPU resources for this cluster as well.

Once you have completed the prerequisites, you can install Harness CD Community Edition. Run the following commands to clone the content of the Harness Git repo into your local directory (docker-compose folder). 

git clone https://github.com/harness/harness-cd-communitycd harness-cd-community/docker-compose/harness

Then run the below command.to download all required Harness images and bring up the containers.

docker-compose up -d

Next, you’ll need to create an account here: http://localhost/#/signup. Now you’re on your way! The Harness wizard will help you set up a project, set up a pipeline, and complete your first deployment. 

You can also follow the Harness CD Community Edition Quickstart doc that shows you how to deploy a nginx service onto your Kubernetes cluster using the standard rolling deployment strategy. You can run this pipeline and see a deployment similar to the one shown below.

Just the Beginning

This is our first GA release of Harness CD Community Edition, and it is the first time we’ve taken a subset of our SaaS offering to create software you can run yourself. SaaS and software are completely different mediums, so we would love to get your feedback! You can give us feedback or ask us any questions on our community page.

Join us live to learn more about Harness CD Community Edition.

You can find the link to the Harness CD Community Edition on GitHub. Download and deploy within 15 minutes to see how you can level up continuous delivery in the new year!