CI/CD and the New Generation of Software Delivery: an Interview with Harness

Petros Koutoupis — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 13:15:15 +0000

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) is all the rage in the modern world of software development. But actually what is this pipeline process? It's a method or set of principles for which development teams implement and deliver code more frequently and reliably.

Continuous integration embodies a coding philosophy and set of practices propelling teams to implement small and frequent code changes into version control repositories, while the continuous delivery picks up where the CI ends and automates the application's delivery

Many platforms, such as Jenkins and CircleCI, exist to help companies and teams streamline the development and integration of their software stacks, but not much exists in the way of easing and automating the process of delivery. And with what does exist, the solutions tend to fall short with features and functionality, or they are overly complicated to configure in the first place.

This is where Harness comes into the picture. Harness produces the industry's very first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform. Using machine learning, it simplifies and automates the entire CD process. Steve Burton, VP of marketing at Harness, recently took the time to share more details with me.

Petros Koutoupis: Please introduce yourself to our readers.

Steve Burton: While officially the VP of marketing, I am a DevOps Evangelist over at Harness. What this means is that I do a little bit of everything. While most of my career has been in product management and marketing, I stepped out of the university with a bachelor's degree in computer science and an initial career in Java development (ca. 2004 at Sapient), working on large-scale enterprise J2EE implementations. Prior to Harness, I did geek stuff at AppDynamics, Moogsoft and Glassdoor. And when not knee-deep in take, I enjoy spending my time watching F1 and researching cars on the web.

PK: What is Harness?

SB: We provide Continuous Delivery as-a-Service. It's the CD bit of the CI/CD equation that helps customers automate how their software is deployed and delivered to end users in production.

We basically allow customers to move fast without breaking things, so they can increase developer velocity without the risk of downtime or failure.

PK: What problem or problems does Harness solve?

SB: Developers are under tremendous pressure to deliver applications to production, fast and with zero error. It's a constant pain, one that I personally dealt with as a former Java developer. Our founders had also seen this challenge firsthand, and that's why they started Harness.

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