Harness Community Edition: How Not to Get Left Behind in the Continuous Delivery Race
Harness sponsored this post.
Among the key advantages of software as a service (SaaS) and cloud providers offer is how easy it has become to try out and test new technologies and platforms.
One tool that greatly lowers the barrier of entry for advanced continuous delivery (CD) processes in cloud environments is Harness’ free-forever Community Edition. You can think of this as a special treat for organizations or individuals looking to shortcut and master CD.
A Free Speed Boat (with Lots of Toys)
Still, it’s often not easy keeping up with the pace of change in the software industry. Take a look at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation Landscape, for example, the number of projects on offer is ever increasing. With this amount of change and technology velocity, it can sometimes feel that we are on a sinking ship if we are not moving forward.
Looking at the 2018 DORA Accelerate State of DevOps report, organizations/teams are ranked from low, medium, high and elite performers. No team obviously wants to be on the lower end of the spectrum. Even more so, what if you don’t even qualify for the low-performing bar? But, of course, you need to keep moving forward, and most of all, keep learning, in order to survive and eventually thrive. Community Edition serves as one way to continue to remain in the race.
We have taken great care so that the Community Edition did not become a bait-and-hook solution. Instead, we’ve made it something great that teams can actually use every day. Community Edition, for example, does not expire at the end of a trial period. It also shares many features with the Harness Pro Edition for CD, including:
- Pipeline builder, workflow wizards and triggers;
- GitOps and pipelines-as-code (YAML);
- Infrastructure provisioning (Terraform and CloudFormation);
- Real-time deployment analytics;
- Rolling, blue/green and automated canary deployment strategies;
- Continuous verification for open source monitoring (AI/ML-based health checks);
- Automatic rollback;
- Secrets management;
- Single sign-on (SSO) for Google, Azure, Github and other platforms.
One of the Best Bits? It’s Free — Forever
Continuous verification and automatic rollbacks are among the stand-out features on offer for free. The former uses unsupervised machine learning to auto-verify deployments with metrics from open source monitoring, such as Prometheus, StackDriver and CloudWatch. You can think of it as automated canary deployments on steroids for the cloud native world. It also uses techniques like hidden Markov models, K-Means clustering and neural nets to tell you if application performance/quality is good or bad post-deployment.
Community Edition is targeted at individuals, teams, startups and even open source project developers who want a shortcut to a cloud native CD pipeline. It’s almost as easy to set up and use as one, two, three.
Building an Elite Level Pipeline in 1,2,3
Firing up your first deployment to be on par with elite organizations is simple, even for those who are not familiar with Continuous Delivery (CD) or the new Harness Community Edition.
1. Sign up for your free Community Edition Account with your favorite authentication provider. Once that is completed, we will be taking a look at the Harness Sample Application. Sign in and say “yes” to the Harness Sample Application setup prompt in the blue box;
2. Once that is out of the way, you can start your very first deployment. Since we are taking advantage of our Harness Sample Application, there is an example of a Canary Deployment to show the ease of the canary configuration. The Harness Sample Application now automatically provisions a temporary GKE cluster for an hour (on our dime).
You can kick off a deployment thru Continuous Deployment -> Start New Deployment;.
3. Hit “Submit” and watch your first continuous delivery pipeline come alive. There is an approval stage that will demonstrate if there is a need to have a manual approval for your pipeline.
a:
b:
A New Community (For The Community)
To accompany Community Edition, we’re also launching http://community.harness.io so everyone can participate in online discussions, support fellow Harnessians and contribute ideas to the Harness platform roadmap. You’ll get the usual online forum, Slack channel, and a dollop of deployment banter to help you get in ship shape.
Helping You Scale
At Harness, we are giving all organizations regardless of size an opportunity to be as sophisticated as Netflix — with their own team of platform engineering resources. We are excited to see the art of the possible with effectively helping everyone increase their software delivery velocity with building elite level pipeline capabilities.
If you are feeling flustered with the modern complications of software delivery or even looking to start or enhance your Continuous Delivery, look no further than Harness Community Edition.
Cloud Native Computing Foundation is a sponsor of The New Stack.
Feature image by Roman Grac from Pixabay.
