Centralized CI/CD has improved deployment speed and AI automation now simplifies troubleshooting
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been in my current field for one year and seven months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Automation has reduced deployment effort and now delivers cloud releases faster with fewer errors
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Harness for several months while working in CICD and deployment automation.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
How are customer service and support?
Customer support is good.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Templatized pipelines have improved efficiency while limitations in code-based development remain
What is our primary use case?
Harness has been implemented in our organization for one of our clients for approximately 8 to 10 months. Harness is particularly utilized for our infrastructure provisioning pipelines and our RITM ServiceNow requests.
With Harness CI/CD, one of our main use cases is using it as an infrastructure-provisioning pipeline. Harness allows us to have an end-to-end infrastructure pipeline, which connects our DevOps and our ServiceNow for governance and our custom portal, which we call an infrastructure-provisioning portal, and a central backend database through which we are able to provide a heterogeneous mixture of different resources including AWS, Databricks, Vault, IDMC, and GitHub repositories. Through this, we use Harness as the main platform where we are able to provision and manage all the pipeline executions as well as our requests that we receive for infrastructure provisioning.
Our team primarily interacts with Harness using their Pipeline Studio. That is one of our finest use cases, and currently, we are also looking forward to integrating Harness or working within Harness so that we can do more pipeline-as-code type development.
What is most valuable?
One of the best features Harness offers is the ability to templatize pipelines. Through template pipelines, we are able to reuse pipelines across different of our internal workstreams, and we are able to utilize various organization-level templates for various common use cases including ServiceNow RITM tickets or infrastructure-provisioning pipelines for Terraform.
Pipeline templatization has been a primary focus of my team, particularly because one of our infrastructure-provisioning requests always has a dependency on Terraform workspaces and GitHub creation. To address that, we resolved the issue by creating an end-to-end child pipeline that is part of our FTP platform. That pipeline is then utilized across all our different workstreams to provision Terraform workspaces and connect with Vault and GitHub IAC, so that we can effectively and reliably create infrastructure as code repositories. That is how we are able to work with templatization.
Harness Pipeline Studio is another feature that stands out. A good visual platform that allows us to see the pipeline end to end in an architectural manner is always helpful.
What needs improvement?
Harness UI can do a lot of good things. Harness's UI should not feel very complicated. At the current stage, it feels very commercialized and compared to other platforms such as Argo CD or Jenkins, which feel much more lively and much more simple. Infrastructure as code or pipeline as code is something that Harness severely lacks. There is not a lot of good support for pipeline as code, and I often find myself not using pipeline as code the way other platforms such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins integrate pipeline as code. Pipeline as code is definitely one of the disadvantages when it comes to Harness. Additionally, the entire platform feels very commercialized, which is something that a lot of developers, especially open-source enthusiasts, might not appreciate even within the organization.
One of the very important key factors I observed was that there is no way to execute nested pipelines, which means that we cannot execute child pipelines within child pipelines and child pipelines even within those child pipelines. There is no way to execute nested pipeline execution, which may or may not be required based on the use case, but it is definitely one of those features that I wish the platform had.
For how long have I used the solution?
Harness has been implemented in our organization for one of our clients for approximately 8 to 10 months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Harness is decently stable. I do feel there has been some downtime, but it may be a problem with our platform or our teams internally. Overall, I feel the platform is stable enough.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Harness scalability is good. It is able to work on our infrastructure side, which is EKS, and we are able to handle our organization growth effectively for an enterprise use case.
How are customer service and support?
Although I have not directly interacted with customer support, we have been receiving incident reports whenever an incident occurs on Harness, and they are usually quick to respond, which is always an advantage.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
In my organization, we were and are still using GitHub Actions. GitHub Actions is the primarily CI/CD tool that we use, particularly because it comes with direct integration with our enterprise GitHub setup, and it is a natural tool that a lot of developers are familiar with in today's time. The reason why we shifted to Harness from GitHub Actions for a few of our edge use cases or newer use cases was because of pipeline templatization, a studio visual code development experience, as well as easy integration with other pipelines and templates that have been developed throughout the organization.
How was the initial setup?
My organization opted for Harness through AWS Marketplace and by reaching out to professionals and support teams at Harness.
What was our ROI?
By adopting templates and various different pipelines across our own IDP platform, we have saved upwards of 30 to 40% of development time and also reduced risks of failures or error rates by upwards of 70%.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
From what I understand with respect to Harness, licensing and setup costs were relatively low for an enterprise, and the pricing was more catered toward enterprises who would invest in the technology. The price that they pay extra for that technology compared to what they would have paid for open-source is then offset by the number of projects they are able to onboard.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
In our organization, the only other option that we really evaluated was Argo CD. We did not go for Argo CD primarily because it was already open-source, and while using it, it felt more catered specifically toward Kubernetes, which was great. Our use cases are varied because we work with different domains such as AI and data engineering. We are dealing with a heterogeneous set of architecture, and while Argo CD did integrate nicely with Kubernetes-based deployments, it lacks severely in those other areas where Harness shines.
What other advice do I have?
For others looking to use Harness, they should first evaluate their own organization to determine if Harness really solves all their use cases. Harness is somewhat use-case dependent, meaning while it definitely lacks in pipeline as code, it is still able to provide a pipeline-based studio, which is something that is unique to the platform itself. It could be a great performance booster for teams that are working heavily with other aspects of the application stack and not focused completely on pipelines. My overall rating of Harness is 6 out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Using diverse deployment styles ensures zero downtime and simplifies onboarding while managing errors and secrets efficiently
What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case for
Harness is as a deployment tool. Although I am not a DevOps engineer, my team uses
Harness for deployment purposes, handling configurations and onboarding applications to the Harness platform.
What is most valuable?
The features of Harness are valuable, supporting rolling deployments, basic deployments, and blue-green deployments with zero downtime. It offers multiple deployment styles, low timeouts, and clear logs with different views. Harness uses AI to suggest errors in case of deployment failures. It integrates well with
HashiCorp Vault, seamlessly managing secrets such as database passwords.
What needs improvement?
When deploying multiple components to multiple environments, like production and BCP, failures sometimes occur. Improvements are needed when deploying one component to one environment.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Harness for more than one year.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
The deployment using Harness is a simple process, with features like automated rollback enhancing deployment security and reliability. Harness uses additional instances during deployment; if a new instance fails, it rolls back to the previous instance, ensuring zero downtime with rolling deployment.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
As a SaaS product, Harness is scalable. Our entire organization uses it with hundreds of applications, and it supports this scale effectively.
How are customer service and support?
We rely on our internal Harness support team for resolving issues, rather than external support from Harness.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, we used
Azure deployment and
UrbanCode Deploy (UCD). We switched to Harness because it supports rolling deploy pipelines with zero downtime, unlike UCD, which required downtime for deployment.
How was the initial setup?
I did not participate in Harness's initial setup as it was handled by a different team. I found the onboarding process straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
Implementation teams such as DevOps engineers at our company handled the setup. We, as the application developer team, did not work on initial setup.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before moving to Harness, we used
Azure deployment. No other solutions were evaluated as our company, Wells Fargo, opted for enterprise support from Harness.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Harness eight out of ten. Users should consider the need for deploying multiple components to multiple environments and the potential issues when doing so.
