Harness Platform - Intelligent Software Delivery for AWS Marketplace

Harness  is a delivery platform where we can create pipelines. I have been using Harness  for deploying my application into my Kubernetes  environment.

I had a couple of backend applications which used to talk with some other remote vendor-based services where they used to fetch data. For those applications' deployment I used Harness where I set up code push stages, build app stages, test stages, and then the deployment stage in Harness. Through Harness we deployed the code to my environment.

I set up those pipelines in the form of multiple environments. By multiple environments, I mean that normally we do have multiple environments such as dev, QA, pre-prod, and prod. What we used to do was have pipelines based on environments. For example, if the build happens and the Docker  images are being created and then there comes a stage where it gets deployed. If everything works fine in the dev stage, it automatically gets deployed to the QA, then pre-prod and prod. All of these things were done by Harness, and Harness was so advanced that it used to understand the integration of those pipelines and it used to work in a coalition manner.

Harness is a managed platform that has a modern UI compared to the other CI/CD tools out there. It has built-in CI/CD features, and nowadays, it has AI features as well. AI-based troubleshooting, AI-based pipeline generation, and AI-based features are available. It also has test intelligence and automatic rollbacks. With AI, you can create scripts, and it requires less scripting, and it's commercial.

AI pipeline generation and AI test creation are two certain things which have really helped me. The reason being is that if my application requires or I'm onboarding a new application, I can use that AI pipeline generation feature to generate the pipeline and AI test creation also to create the test cases for my application. If something goes wrong, I can use AI troubleshooting to build or test my fails and analyze the logs, suggesting the fixes.

Using Harness, the deployment time has been reduced, plus the time taken during troubleshooting any issue is reduced, and the time taken to write the test cases has reduced using the AI features. Deployment time has really been reduced. If we want to onboard some new applications, we can just quickly onboard it and quickly create the pipeline to deploy it. Even if something goes wrong while deploying it to production or any environment, the AI troubleshooting feature which Harness has really helps to analyze the logs and suggest the fixes.

Nowadays, most of the applications are containerized applications. Harness has really rich features, and ideally, it's based on the CI/CD tool. However, native integrations with tools or features that normally people use would be beneficial. For instance, Argo CD or Helm should have some direct implementation on Harness. Even though they have those AI features, if some sample pipelines or some advanced level integrations are already pre-made, that would be really great.

The licensing cost can be significant for larger teams, which should be taken into account. If we are already using some other CI/CD tools, Harness should provide a way so that we can migrate our CI/CD pipelines to Harness. Currently, if we are moving from another tool to Harness, we just have to write the pipeline from scratch. Even though we can use AI features, we still have to give a lot of effort. Harness should have some way that if we provide them our previous application pipelines, they can generate a pipeline based on top of Harness. Sometimes some advanced workflows also may require custom scripting. Those features should also be there, so that if there are some advanced workflows, Harness is intelligent enough to just create a sample pipeline according to the use case and then we can modify it according to our need.

The same concerns about the guardrails apply. If Harness can also tell us what guardrails they have for their AI features, that would be really great.

I have used Harness for a couple of years.

Harness is stable.

As Harness is a managed SaaS solution, the vendor has to maintain the scalability. If we have deployed it on-prem, we can work as it is and just scale on our need.

Customer support is really great and does really help us.

I did evaluate options such as native CI/CD cloud solutions. I used Jenkins , GitHub Actions , GitLab , and Tecton.

The major investment which I have seen is time saved. As I already told previously, Harness has AI capabilities and we don't need to have multiple stacks. Harness comes with all the stacks inbuilt. So we don't have to look or invest our time in looking for the other tools to suffice our use case. We can use Harness as a single source of truth. The AI features that they have and with which we can rewrite the pipeline and troubleshoot issues significantly saved time.

Everything is fine with licensing and setup. However, the licensing cost is a little bit too high. If cost is something that can be looked upon, it would be really great.

I was using Jenkins  and GitHub Actions . Because I am a client intrinsic company, it depends on what the client needs. According to client need, I use GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or GitLab . However, if sometimes clients do ask me my opinion, I do tell them that Harness can be explored.

Approximately seventy-five percent time was reduced in case of deployment and around sixty to sixty-five percent time was reduced while troubleshooting it.

In my case, the number of times I have used Harness, it has given me the appropriate output and appropriate suggestions. So I think the accuracy and reliability of Harness is really high.

I would really advise them to use it if they don't want multiple tech stacks and cost is not a concern. So I would really suggest others to use Harness.

Harness is a really good tool with the rich features it has, and it's really advanced nowadays. I gave this review a rating of eight out of ten.

My main use case for Harness  is to create pipelines, deploy applications, and manage security pipelines.

I use Harness  to deploy applications to EC2  instances and Kubernetes  instances, and I created pipelines for building an application, deploying an application, running security scans on repositories, syncing scans, and many more. I even used running automation tests on Harness pipelines.

The best features Harness offers, in my opinion, are the ability to create pipelines with YAML files and the Terraform  codes. It is easy to manage, easy to scale up, and easy to create multiple stages. It interacts with a lot of third-party applications. We use Terraform  everywhere, so using Terraform to create pipelines makes our job easier.

Harness has impacted my organization positively; we use Harness in most of all deployments, so it is uniform. When I say it is uniform, it has helped us save time, reduce errors, and make collaboration easier, with the AI integrations helping us to create tests faster, trigger tests faster, and finish tests faster while keeping logs.

There are some UI components that can be improved. The needed UI improvements include more graphs, more history, the ability to create pipelines through the UI, and more interactions, with UI components being more standardized.

I have been using Harness for two years.

Harness is stable.

Harness can be scaled very fast.

I used Concourse and Bamboo  before switching to Harness.

My advice for others looking into using Harness is to use AI capabilities, create pipelines, and then use it to deploy. Harness is a good tool. I would rate this review a nine out of ten.

Initially, the main use case for Harness  was to manage CI/CD and automate software delivery workflows across the engineering infrastructure, as we had challenges across fragmented tools such as Jenkins , GitHub Actions , and deployment scripts across multiple systems that led to failed pipelines as the engineering team was scaling. We switched to Harness  to consolidate that CI/CD deployment automation part and rollback capabilities into a single platform, which allowed us to centralize software delivery while improving deployment safety.

Our main use case is managing CI/CD pipelines and automating software delivery, and Harness has actually helped us reduce deployment time and improve release reliability, which I would say is one of the most valuable features that we have been considerably inclined to. Despite the initial complexity we faced, it is a very powerful platform that has simplified software delivery and accelerated debugging and deployments for our team. It has provided an end-to-end DevOps platform with AI-assisted automation tools, significantly reducing the complexity of deployment, and the release confidence has increased by ten fold.

Harness has provided a unified DevOps workflow that has significantly reduced the manual deployment effort, and the visual pipeline management, combined with the AI automation that Harness provides, has allowed our engineering team to build and deploy applications much faster. One of the largest advantages is the ability to roll back if a release is bad, which helps us greatly to reduce production risk and improve overall developer confidence. The AI-powered assistant helps us identify pipeline failures, provides debugging insights, and simplifies troubleshooting to help engineers identify issues much faster. Additionally, Harness has also improved our onboarding of new DevOps engineers, as the centralized CI/CD workflows and tools allow new members to easily understand the architecture instead of going through multiple tools as it used to be.

Feature flagging and verification tools are a major part of Harness. The unified platform through Harness is extremely valuable because it has reduced our tool sprawl; instead of maintaining separate CI/CD, feature flagging, and verification tools, we can now manage everything effectively. This has greatly influenced our decision-making and simplified operational management significantly. Harness scales very effectively, and as deployment frequency increases and the infrastructure grows larger, the platform continues to automate releases, detect slight anomalies, and devise workflows without any performance issues, making automation become even more influential, especially as manual deployment becomes increasingly difficult for a larger team.

The AI-assisted automation is one of the major benefits of Harness, which is our main reason for utilizing the platform as it offers an all-in-one interface of CI/CD and everything. The AI-powered assistant helps us identify pipeline failures and provides debugging insights that have made troubleshooting way easier than it used to be. Before, we had to skim through all the lines of code to find a resolution, but now, we have simplified that troubleshooting process by about four to five fold, allowing engineers to identify issues much faster instead of manually analyzing logs across different systems. Beyond deployment automation, AI has become a major part of our day-to-day processes, saving time for our engineers in development rather than manually finding logs.

Harness excels in scalability, particularly during the scaling process where it continues to automate releases and effectively manage the growing infrastructure. The elimination of bottlenecks in workflows is an additional benefit that Harness provides, and as our workflows and team sizes increase, manual management becomes increasingly challenging. Harness has made that easier for us.

Harness is a very feature-rich platform, but the large number of modules can feel overwhelming for beginners as it requires a certain learning curve to understand module configurations and deployment pipelines. The interface is powerful but is not as beginner-friendly for teams without mature DevOps practices or experience. Due to the complexity of its initial use and the steep pricing for smaller companies, Harness may not feel accessible for new-age startups with simpler CI/CD needs.

One key area for improvement is simplifying the onboarding of new users; the reduction of platform complexity will help new users understand how all components interact, which feels initially very difficult. Being a powerful platform, Harness might seem excessive for early-stage startups or smaller teams that cannot utilize its full capabilities. If onboarding and pricing could be more accessible, Harness could be a game-changer for anyone using CI/CD.

I have been in my current field for one year and seven months.

Harness has been very stable; we have not faced major issues with it. Deployment pipelines, rollback systems, and performance reliability have been excellent even during high deployment activity.

Harness is very well scalable; as my organization grows and workflows and engineering teams expand, I have not seen any scaling issues at all. It handles increasing complexity in deployment pipelines and maintains high release frequency without any issues.

I have not required extensive customer support involvement, as the documentation is well-structured. The initial setup does require exploration, but we have not faced major issues that required support.

Before Harness, we were using Jenkins , GitHub Actions , AWS  CI/CD, and Argo CD, each of which handled part of the DevOps cycle. We switched to Harness because it combined CI/CD deployment, verification, rollback automation, and AI-assisted workflows into a single platform, reducing our overload and the need to evaluate multiple tools.

We have seen a strong return on investment from Harness, primarily through deployment automation that has reduced our engineering overhead. Deployment times have improved significantly, and the need for manual intervention during releases has reduced considerably, which has also led to about a fifteen to twenty percent improvement in deployment efficiency and a seven to ten percent reduction in debugging and release coordination time as well. The biggest ROI comes from faster software delivery and improved engineering productivity. The time to resolve issues has been cut by about thirty to thirty-five percent, while the time to deploy has actually been cut in half.

Initially, the pricing was relatively expensive compared to open-source CI/CD solutions, which made us hesitant. However, once Harness was fully integrated into our workflow, the operational benefits became clear, justifying the investment for our use case, despite the slightly higher cost for smaller teams.

I evaluated Jenkins, GitHub Actions, AWS  CI/CD, and Argo CD before choosing Harness, but Harness stood out as a single combined interface for CI/CD deployment verification.

My advice for organizations considering Harness is to evaluate the complexity of their workflows. For smaller teams with simple deployment needs, lightweight tools may suffice, but larger teams with multi-environment releases would benefit greatly from Harness's operational capabilities.

I would rate Harness an eight overall. I chose eight because it is a very good tool, although it might not fit every organization's needs perfectly. My advice for organizations considering Harness is to evaluate the complexity of their deployment workflows and engineering operations first. For teams with simple deployment needs, lightweight CI/CD tools may suffice, while companies with large engineering teams and complex deployment processes could experience at least one point five times improvement in operational efficiency with Harness. The platform is very valuable for deployment automation and centralized DevOps, but its complexity during the initial learning phase and steep pricing make it an eight instead of a ten.

Harness is a great tool, but the initial complexity and cost can be challenging for those with minimal CI/CD needs, while it can be a game-changer for larger engineering teams requiring heavy deployment operations.

Harness  automates the CI/CD pipelines and manages applications deployments across different environments like staging, development, and production. I use it to monitor the deployments and ensure stability, so when developers push new code to the repository, Harness  automatically triggers the CI pipeline, builds the application, runs tests, and prepares the deployment packages. After validation, the CD pipeline deploys the applications to the cloud environment, automating the workflow and helping us deliver faster.

Some of the best features of Harness include powerful CI/CD pipeline automation, intelligent deployment strategies, and building monitoring. The platform also supports cloud-native environments and Kubernetes  deployments, making pipeline management easier, and its automation capabilities significantly improve speed and reliability.

Harness improved deployment reliability by automating the continuous delivery pipelines and adding building verification checks, so deployments are automated and verified using performance metrics, and the platform also saved time by reducing manual operational tasks.

It has saved time; previously I needed many employees to handle deployments, but now the number of employees has reduced and the speed has increased, which is one of the good benefits.

One improvement I see for Harness is simplifying the configuration process for smaller teams or startups, as the platform offers powerful features that new users may require some time to understand. Improved documentation and onboarding tutorials would help accelerate adoption.

The analytics dashboard could be enhanced to provide deeper insights into pipeline performance.

The user interface could be improved.

I have been using Harness for several months while working in CICD and deployment automation.

Harness is stable.

It is scalable.

Customer support is good.

I appreciate that Harness provides good visibility into pipeline execution and deployment status, and I appreciate how it simplifies the complex CI/CD workflows. Its automation features help reduce human errors during releases.

The pricing is good, but it can be reduced if there is a bigger team, and it should have a good plan.

Using Harness, I now need fewer employees.

Harness is good to use; I have to look after the deployments as well. I give this review a rating of 9.