Harness debuts new code management tools for its software delivery platform

Harness Inc., a well-funded startup that helps developers release code to production faster, today introduced four new tools for its namesake software platform.

The company also debuted an open-source project called Gitness. It’s a code hosting platform that Harness positions as an alternative to GitHub. Gitness powers one of the four tools it introduced for its platform today.

Development teams historically updated their software every few weeks or months. Today, software updates are released as often as several times a day. This increased development velocity is made possible by a methodology called CI/CD, or continuous integration and continuous delivery.

Implementing the methodology requires specialized software tools that can take upwards of weeks to deploy. Harness offers a CI/CD platform that it says can be set up in a few hours. The company, which is backed by more than $350 million in funding, also provides tools that ease other engineering tasks such as reducing an application’s cloud infrastructure usage.

The open-source Gitness tool that Harness debuted today is designed to help developers manage their code files. Similarly to GitHub, it allows software teams to store all of an application’s code in a single repository for easy access. Built-in collaboration features enable team members to review one another’s software changes for errors before releasing them.

According to Harness, Gitness offers its code management features alongside a built-in CI/CD engine. Developers can use the engine to automate the process of deploying newly written software in production.

Gitness powers Code Repository, the first of the four tools Harness introduced for its flagship CI/CD platform today. The tool extends its feature set with a number of additional capabilities. In particular, it offers integrations with third-party development tools and uses an open-source technology called OPA to ensure developers’ code complies with their company’s internal best practices.

Code Repository is rolling out alongside a second tool called the Internal Developer Portal. According to Harness, the latter offering enables software teams to more easily access the technology assets they need for their work.

In the enterprise, developers often have access to dozens or hundreds of prepackaged software components built by their colleagues. Those components reduce the amount of time required to build a new application. However, they can be difficult to find because they’re often scattered across different systems and business units.

Using Harness’ new Internal Developer Portal, a company can create a centralized catalog of its internal software components. Developers can use the catalog to quickly find the technologies they require for a project. Moreover, the tool ensures users deploy software components in a manner that complies with cybersecurity requirements and other internal rules.

The two other tools that Harness introduced as part of today’s update are more specialized. Each is designed to help developers more easily manage one specific type of software asset.

The first tool promises to simplify the management of infrastructure-as-code, or IaC, files. Those are scripts that developers use to automate infrastructure management tasks such as creating new cloud instances. Harness’ platform can now be used to test IaC files for errors, deploy them in production and identify cases where an infrastructure asset doesn’t operate as expected.

Harness is also adding a tool for managing open-source software. Many enterprise applications incorporate code components from the open-source ecosystem. Using Harness’ platform, a company can now monitor such components and ensure they don’t contain any cybersecurity vulnerabilities.