Harness Levels Up Software Delivery Platform with Unified Pipeline, Test Intelligence, Feature Flags, and Cloud AutoStopping

Harness, the leading platform for software delivery, today kicked off its annual developer conference, {Unscripted} 2021, with significant platform updates that address gaps in today's developer and DevOps market. By bringing all of the critical components of software development into a unified pipeline, developers and businesses can build software faster, more securely and more frequently without compromising quality, performance or security.

The Harness platform updates include four core components geared at optimizing the developer experience:

• Test Intelligence reduces test cycle time by up to 98% using AI/ML workflows to prioritize and optimize test execution without developers compromising on quality;
• Feature Flags allow developers to release, manage and govern features at scale;
• Unified Pipeline allows developers to manage all aspects of software delivery in a simple, smart, scalable pipeline -- without writing a single script;
• Cloud AutoStopping reduces cloud compute waste associated with non-production environments (dev, qa, load, staging) by up to 75%.

"Significant costs and many hours are incurred daily as engineering teams continuously build, test and deploy software," said Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder, Harness. "The new Harness platform gives developers the only pipeline they'll need. Customers can now do it all from one platform—so they can ultimately deliver software at scale quickly, reliably and securely."

"Prior to working with Harness, our developers spent endless hours having to stitch together pipelines, reducing productivity and security while increasing cost," said Ken Angell, Software Architect, Ancestry. "Harness has allowed us to centralize our systems and heavily increase security processes across all of our efforts."

Test Intelligence
Testing slows down developers the most because they lack automation, prioritization, and optimization of tests. According to the State of DevOps 2019 report, elite software delivery performers deploy on-demand multiple times a day to production. A major challenge to becoming elite is the testing step, which has become the most time consuming, and critical part of any CI/CD pipeline.

With Harness' Test Intelligence, developers speed up these cycles while maintaining enterprise grade governance and quality. Harness' Test Intelligence automatically shifts the failed tests earlier in the build cycle so that the developer will know, almost immediately, if the fix worked. Test cycles that used to take several hours to complete can now complete in minutes, allowing developers to deploy to production with confidence more frequently on any given day.

Harness is the only software delivery company on the market using test intelligence driven by AI and ML, which reduces the time and resources required for testing by cutting out unnecessary tests from the CI process.

"Fundamentally, a deployment pipeline is there in order to be able to figure out how we can optimize our tests, and get feedback on them, as quickly and efficiently as possible, however big or complex the body of tests become over-time" said Dave Farley, Founder, Continuous Delivery UK during his Unscripted Keynote.

Feature Flags
Harness Feature Flags allow developers to release new features without making them visible to users. They have total control over which pieces of functionality are on and off, outside of the code.

Companies can test out more advanced and complex scenarios like feature A/B testing or software functionality variations like one- or two-step checkout. And Feature Flags make it easy to make changes to software functionality on the fly and instantaneously. It saves hours of engineering effort per feature and reduces risk.

"Harness Feature Flags has enabled us to implement true CI/CD. We're shortening our commit-to-production time that used to be governed by a monthly release cycle, and releasing features to customers faster and more safely than we could before," said Sam Hall, Head of Technology, Metrikus.

Unified Pipeline & Platform
Today, developers and teams use multiple toolsets and pipelines for software delivery, limiting their velocity, productivity, and deployment frequency. Context switching between multiple tools, and babysitting configuration and upgrades introduces TOIL (low value, manual, repetitive tasks) for developers.

Harness' Unified Pipeline solves this problem by offering continuous integration, continuous delivery, feature flags, cloud cost management, and change verification all in a single pipeline and platform, which is available as-a-service, so developers don't need to manage or babysit multiple tools behind their pipelines.

Cloud AutoStopping
One significant cost incurred by engineering teams is public cloud resources as software artifacts are promoted through dev, qa, load, and staging environments. Static non-production environments can sit idle or zombie for 95% of the time which adds to the cost of software delivery. Harness has integrated its acquisition of Lightwing technology into its Cloud Cost Management module so engineering teams can auto-stop (and restart) their non-production environments in seconds, thus eliminating cloud waste by up to 75%.

"No existing solutions or in-house solutions worked. When I saw Harness' Cloud AutoStopping in action and fully automating, I was blown away at the innovation and how perfectly it fits our needs," said Dheemanth Ramesh, CTO, Discover Dollar. "The total savings we've been able to bring in is easily 60-70% of our bill."

Harness' own engineering team recently tested out the new capability. They were able to reduce AWS non-production spend by 25% and Azure non-production spend by 50% - saving more than $125,000 annually.