Today marks the launch of Harness.io, continuous delivery as a service. The company is founded by some of the original team at AppDynamics. They want to take the same kind of approach AppDynamics brought to APM, to the CI/CD market. We caught up with Steve Burton, VP of product marketing at Harness to get the scoop on this exciting new company.
As usual immediately below is the audio of our discussion and the transcript of our discussion follows after that.
Audio
Transcript
Steve is VP of Product Marketing at Harness, a new Continuous Delivery-As A-Service Platform. Prior to Harness, Steve ran Product Marketing at AppDynamics, Moogsoft and Glassdoor. Steve also started his career as a Java developer back in 2004 at Sapient. When he’s not playing around with technology he’s normally watching Formula 1 or researching cars on the internet. Twitter: @BurtonSays
Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, with another DevOps Chat here on DevOps.com. Today’s chat is with Steve Burton, VP of products at an exciting new company – just launched today – called “Harness.” Steve, welcome.
Steve Burton: Thanks, Alan. Great to be here.
Shimel: Great to have you here and, hey, it’s a great day to launch a company, Steve.
Burton: Yes. Sure.
Shimel: Of course, you know, I’m reminded of what someone told me when I sold the first company I started, and they said, “Companies are like boats – the best two days are the day you buy ’em and the day you sell them.” So this is one of the good – this is one of the big days for ya. And speaking of that, though, Steve, before we get into what Harness is about and markets and stuff, you actually – you’re one of the founding team there, and the team’s really kind of a get-together of a lot of the guys who helped found AppDynamics, I guess, back in the day. Correct?
Burton: Yeah, for sure, with a few AppDynamics guys here. We’ve also got people from Apple and Google as well, so there’s a nice mix. But, yeah, for sure. There’s Jyoti, there’s myself, Greg Howard, and Randy Boysen, so there’s – yeah, that’s what we love to do, is build start-ups.
Shimel: Yeah. Getting the band back together. So, Steve, though, with Harness, though, you guys have taken an interesting kind of approach here in that, you know, you see a tremendous opportunity within the CICD market. Correct?
Burton: Yeah. Yes. I mean, Harness has primarily kind of been built for continuous delivery as a service, so the kind of CD part of CICD, and we think there’s a big opportunity there. There’s a lot of excitement, there’s a lot of projects and customers, and there’s a lot of complexity to solve, and so, yeah, that’s what we’ve kind of founded the company to kinda help customers with.
Shimel: Sure. And, Steve, I mean, here at DevOps.com, we obviously follow the CD space pretty closely, and there’s certainly no lack of companies that have thrown their hat in the ring here, right, without naming names, from well-funded start-ups to big, traditional 800-pound gorillas, but the fact that no one has really captured a dominant market share probably indicates it’s because no one’s really come up with the killer CD app, if you will, or the – and if it’s not the app, maybe it’s the delivery means and everything else. Is that part of what drove you guys to, you know, go this route with Harness?
Burton: Yeah, I mean, for sure. I mean, if you speak to Jyoti, one of the key reasons he founded the company was when he was, obviously, CEO and founder of AppDynamics, he met with a lot of enterprises and big customers, and they were telling him, “Hey, look, we have hundreds of DevOps engineers, but a lot of them are spending their time scripting and building automation platforms. And so there’s no real solution to help us kind of be like a Facebook or a Google, where we can do continuous delivery.” And so that was really the impetus for Jyoti to kind of take a step back and think, “This problem really isn’t solved yet.”
Shimel: Yeah. No, I think you hit on something there ’cause there’s been some – not backlash, but there’s some talk on some of the DevOps channels that, “You know what? DevOps hasn’t been as successful as we thought it was going to be and a lot of organizations aren’t experiencing the success they hoped with DevOps.” And, frankly, a lot of it is subjective, not objective, and maybe some of it also has to do with hyped-up expectations that can never be met anyway.
But, that being said, you hit on something there that I think is important, that, a lot of times, when we talk about DevOps teams and implementing DevOps, it’s time spent figuring out automation, right, and scripting automation. And, whether it be automated testing or automated integration or configuration or what have you, it’s kind of like groundwork, rather than actually doing the work. And you probably need to do the groundwork first, right, Steve? I mean, no one’s – I’m not saying that, but, with a SAS solution like Harness here, you can kinda not cheat, but you can get a head start on that.
Burton: Yeah, for sure, and I think one thing we’ve tried to do is simplify continuous delivery, and so a lot of the scripting and automation that you might require teams of DevOps engineers to do, we feel we can give those teams a solid platform that they can build on top of, to do continuous delivery. And so I actually sympathize because, if you look at the complexity and the work involved to make continuous delivery work, it’s more than just provisioning infrastructure and configuration management. I mean, today, you’ve got release strategies, you’ve got canary deployments, you got blue-green. You think it’ll verify how those deployments succeed in production. You’ve got rollback, so, if things fail, how quickly can you roll back?
And I think as well, from speaking to customers, one thing we hear a lot of is just the compliance and security around DevOps, and so DevOps is ultimately about empowering teams and giving freedom to developers and operations, but, at the same time, these companies need to control and audit and make sure that things are done correctly. So a lot of the boring stuff, like the credentials and secrets management and kind of visibility and reporting, that’s as much of the puzzle as a lot of the cool stuff.
Shimel: Yeah, you’re talking my language, Steve. Certainly, security and compliance, and I tend to think compliance is the caboose on the security engine. You know, just doing compliance doesn’t make you secure. But, that being said, security and compliance are major – they could be your best friend or your worst enemy, in the continuous delivery game, right? If you do it right, you could automate a lot of that and shift it left. It could really help speed up a successful CD process, a successful experience. But if you don’t pay attention to it and you run afoul of your security and compliance, I mean, it’s like going back to “Go,” don’t collect the 200 bucks, and you’re starting from scratch. So it’s an important piece of the puzzle, for sure.
Steve, give us a little background, though, in – you know, so Harness sees this and the team sees this opportunity with CD. It’s a SAS-based solution. What more can you tell our audience about what you guys are doing?
Burton: Yeah. So, primarily, it’s SAS and we also offer on-premise software as well, so you can deploy either model. I think what we’re trying to do is three things, is one is automate the actual deployment aspects, and so, instead of needing kinda scripting or coding a lot of the configuration and wiring together all of your ecosystem, and so you kind of use CI in your repository tools, like Jenkins, Bamboo, JFrog, CircleCI; and then making those kind of work in sync with kind of Amazon cloud platforms, Kubernetes, Docker; and then, finally, all the configurations. So what we’ve tried to do is build reusable connectors and templates for all of the technologies in the ecosystem so that you can literally plug them together and build CD pipelines in minutes.
And that sounds totally alien and kinda sounds too good to be true. We’ve managed to do it, but it’s been a lot of work and it’s been working with a lot of customers. And so, in the last 3, 4 months, we’ve literally had, I think, 270 kind of validation meetings with customers. We’ve got over 20 betas in deployment. And so it’s been understanding that complexity of how we can simplify the CD pipelines today. So, yeah, it’s still a lot of work to do, but I think we’re on the right path.
Shimel: Excellent. And, of course, Steve, you mentioned something that I wanted to bring that out too, is that, you know, it’s sort of this “It takes a village” with CD, right? There’s no one tool that, soup to nuts, is going to do everything for you, and, as you mentioned, Harness already has integrations with a number of the most common tools that are out there, like a Jenkins and so forth.
Burton: Yeah. Yeah, and I think, if you look at a lot of the solutions on the market, they require you to rewrite your CD process and change the way you do deployments and potentially replace tools you already have, and kinda that never really works because most customers have invested a lot of time and money and resources in those tools, in those processes. And so what we do is we can fit around your existing ecosystem and tools, as well as your processes, and so a lot of the customers who’ve gone through our beta program, within the first three or four hours, they’ve actually been able to get a CD pipeline up and running and reuse the Jenkins or reuse all of the cloud technologies and platforms, in addition to the monitoring tools as well.
Shimel: Excellent. So, you know, though today’s launch day, Steve, you guys have actually put in months and months, if not year, already of work on this, but where do you think it goes next?
Burton: Yeah. Yeah, so, in the intro, I talked about us building the building blocks for the automation and getting the CD pipelines built. We’ve also architected Harness to do continuous verification. What that means is, once you’ve deployed code or artifacts in production, we’re actually gonna use machine learning to understand whether that deployment had a positive or negative impact on the business. And so we’re gonna verify things like performance, response times, errors, throughputs, in addition to looking at application logs to see if there’s any regressions or anything that’s been introduced as part of the deployment.
And so that’s what we’re excited about. That really, we believe, is unique to Harness – the ability to validate a production deployment. And if we see failures or we see anomalies, we can automatically roll back to the last working version for the customer, with no interruption to their business. So, for me, the future, it needs to be more than just deployment. If you don’t know the business impact of your deployment in production, then you could say there’s been a lot of work and time and effort for, potentially, nothing.
And I remember, when I was a developer, I worked on projects for months and our success was hitting the go-live day. And once we hit the go-live day, it was operations’ responsibility to deploy it and we never really knew whether we had a positive impact or a negative impact. And I think, in today’s world, with kind of continuous delivery and DevOps and going from an idea to money as quickly as you can, you’ve really gotta know the business impact of every change. And if you don’t, you’re letting your company down.
Shimel: Agreed. Agreed. So, Steve, it sounds – you know, this is something that I’ve always wondered about with DevOps, which is we put so much effort into automation and doing it better, you know, getting better code, automating all of the stuff, automating CI, automating CD to the point where we actually deploy, and then, all of a sudden, post-deployment, we’re on to the next thing or we’re looking for our feedback loops so we can develop the next iteration of it. And I guess sort of APM sort of filled that next post-deployment monitoring and so forth, but it sounds here like Harness wants to fill that gap in there. Is that fair to say?
Burton: Yeah. Definitely. I think we wanna automate how customers verify their deployments, and so the APM market is like $5-billion market right now because, literally, every company’s building software and their software keeps breaking. One stat for you is 30 percent of application deployments fail. This was an article that Wired.com wrote – I think it was a few months ago – but that’s a staggering amount of failure. And the reactive way to deal with failure is to go and buy an APM product to help you kind of troubleshoot in production, when you do a deployment.
The smarter way to do it today is to start and do canary deployments in production, where you roll out the application to a small amount of nodes or users and then verify it before you then roll it out across the rest of your application environment. And so you can kind of think of Harness as a safety net – we’re gonna let you deploy in production, we’ll help you with canary deployments, and, if we see something that’s wrong or we spot an anomaly, you can roll it backward with virtually no business impact
Shimel: Got it. Got it. Well, Steve, believe it or not, we’re probably a little over time here already, but, hey, we tried. Steve, before we wrap up, though, for people who wanna find out more about Harness, where can they go?
Burton: Yeah, they can go to harness.io, is our Web address, and we’ve got lots of videos and will be a free trial coming shortly. And you can actually subscribe for the early adopter program as well, if you wanna show your interest there.
Shimel: Oh, that’s excellent. Excellent. And I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff on the website where people can find out more information of all of these things. Steve, congratulations to you, Jyoti, and the rest of the team. It sounds like you guys are on to your next great adventure and I’m sure it’s gonna be an amazing journey. We hope to have you back here soon and we’ll be watching Harness closely and seeing what it brings to the market. Congratulations.
Burton: Yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks, Alan.
Shimel: All right. Steve Burton, VP product at Harness, at harness.io, if you’re interested. Exciting new entry in the DevOps space. Best of luck, Steve, and we’ll see you soon. This is Alan Shimel for DevOps.com, DevOps Chat. We’ll see you soon on the next DevOps Chat.