Harness Inc., the continuous software delivery startup that provides tools for developers to update and monitor their applications on the fly, has kicked off its annual user conference with a significant update.
The company’s continuous delivery-as-a-service platform is being infused with a “multi-agent” artificial intelligence architecture that promises to transform developer workflows, improve developer experiences and, most importantly, increase productivity.
Announced at Harness’s {unscripted} 2024 event, the latest release is said to embed AI capabilities into the core of its platform, giving rise to an ecosystem of new AI-powered assistants that can help developers with almost every aspect of software delivery.
The Harness platform already makes extensive use of AI, leveraging machine learning algorithms to monitor new software releases in case they create problems for developers. The service makes it easier for users to understand what’s happening in an application’s baseline environment. If a new update starts acting up, they can initiate an automatic rollback to the previous version of that app.
The platform is designed to support continuous integration and continuous deployment or CI/CD methodologies, which is a practice where companies push out frequent updates for their software and applications, often several times a day. Historically, developers would release new features in their software only once every few weeks or months.
With today’s update, Harness is adding new AI capabilities, only this time around it’s not about monitoring the software releases, but specifically about assisting developers in the various tasks they need to perform to roll out those updates.
The new features include specialist AI assistants, such as the AI DevOps Assistant, which is said to support developers throughout the entire software development process. It does this by automating routine pipeline generation, optimizing workflows, tracking deployments and recommending improvements, diagnosing and repairing any issues with the software.
There’s also a new AI Code Assistant, which is similar to GitHub’s Copilot tool, helping developers as they write their software updates by suggesting code, testing it for problems and so on. It’s all about helping developers accelerate the coding process and ensure consistent quality. Meanwhile, there’s an AI Productivity Insights tool that’s said to help by measuring and optimizing the impact of the new AI assistants.
In addition, Harness announced a new Database DevOps feature for simplifying the deployment and governance of database changes by integrating them within user’s CI/CD pipelines and automating policy enforcement.
In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Harness founder and Chief Executive Jyoti Bansal said the AI DevOps assistant and the Database DevOps capabilities are entirely new innovations that no one else can offer. “We’ll have more of these assistants over time,” he added.
The main goal of Harness is to make it simple for developers to adopt and implement a CI/CD workflow. Before Harness arrived on the scene, CI/CD was always a major headache for developer teams, involving a complex array of open-source tools that would take many months to set up. With Harness, developers can simply deploy a prepackaged set of CI/CD features in a matter of minutes.
Bansal said the company has come a long way since launching its first product for continuous software delivery in 2018, building out its platform to offer the most comprehensive set of CI/CD tools around. After beginning with continuous delivery, Harness added continuous integration tools, followed by feature flag capabilities and, most recently, cloud cost management tools.
“We see ourselves as an end-to-end software delivery platform,” he said. “We’ve been systematically taking one piece of the software delivery process at a time and adding it to our platform.”
The company is now accelerating that drive, for there were plenty of other new features in today’s release. For instance, it also introduced “cloud development environments,” which are preconfigured, remote and secure cloud-based environments for writing code and debugging, plus new supply chain security features and a new artifact registry.
Last, the company said it’s making an entirely open-source version of its platform available to developers, enabling them to code, build and manage artifacts and deploy software in a single, centralized environment at zero cost.
“My goal is to build a big platform company,” Bansal said. He wants Harness to be something akin to Salesforce Inc. or Workday Inc., only with a focus on software engineering. “Today it’s all very disjointed,” he added.
With reporting from Robert Hof