Harness Introduces AI-Powered Code and DevOps Agents to Revolutionize Software Delivery

Harness unveils AI code and DevOps agents to accelerate continuous software delivery - SiliconANGLE

Harness unveils AI code and DevOps agents to accelerate continuous software delivery 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.

Harness unveils AI code and DevOps agents to accelerate its software delivery platform - SiliconANGLE

Harness unveils AI code and DevOps agents to accelerate its software delivery platform Harness Inc., the 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 complete software 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, among other aspects of software delivery, 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 (pictured) 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 to cover the complete software delivery process, 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.

Harness aims to accelerate enterprise software development with AI agents

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More In the current generative AI boom, there has been a lot of attention paid to using the technology to generate new code. When it comes to real enterprise use cases for application development, there is much more to the software development lifecycle than just writing code. Today, software development firm Harness announced its latest platform update, which brings in the power of generative AI to assist throughout the enterprise software development and delivery process. Harness was founded back in 2017, with an initial core focus on helping to automate the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) process which is a foundational element of modern DevOps. The company has continued to iterate and expand its offerings to become a software delivery platform. In 2023, the company introduced its AI Development Assistant (AIDA) as a tool to help automate parts of the enterprise software development process. With the new updates today, Harness is significantly expanding its capabilities with a series of AI agents to help accelerate the entire enterprise software development lifecycle. Among the agents are: AI DevOps Engineer (ADE), QA Assistant, AI Code Generation and an AI Productivity Insights service. "Our primary thesis is that developers waste a lot of time doing all the toil," Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Harness told VentureBeat. "Toil comes with all the kinds of tasks that you're doing that are outside of coding." Automating the enterprise software development lifecycle Removing toil is about having smart intelligent automation, that is now powered by AI agents in the Harness platform. Bansal said that the AI DevOps Engineer is an advancement over the company's previous AI developer assistant. He described it as an agent architecture, which does more than just answer questions, it actually does things for developers. This agent can perform complex tasks such as creating pipelines for code building and deployment and even attempting to fix failed deployments automatically. The AI QA Assistant, on the other hand, focuses on generating test automation, particularly for end-to-end testing of web and mobile applications. The QA Assistant specifically targets end-to-end testing evaluating how the end users are experiencing an application. "What we are seeing is about an 80% reduction in the effort it takes to write tests," Bansal said. "The same test that would have taken a week to write for some say, some web application could be brought down to just a few hours." Harness gets into the AI code assistant business As part of the platform update Harness is also finally getting into the AI code assistant space. The Harness AI code assistant uses Google Cloud's Gemini models. AI code assistants are not a new thing with multiple vendors and technologies in the market. Among the early entrants in the space was GitHub Copilot which helps developers to write code. Among the many vendors today that sell AI code assistant technologies are Replit, Tabnine, Oracle and AWS. Bansal said the Harness AI code assistant is similar to GitHub Copilot in that it provides real-time code suggestions and autocompletion capabilities as developers write code. He emphasized that code generation is only one small part of the larger Harness platform and the real differentiation against others is that it is part of the integrated offering. AI Productivity Insights provides a new view into enterprise software development Every enterprise is concerned about productivity, but it's not always an easy thing to measure. That's where the new Harness AI Productivity Insights tool aims to help. Bansal said that the tool helps compare the productivity of developers using AI coding assistants versus those not using them. The goal is to provide quantifiable data on the actual productivity gains from using AI coding assistants, as there have been a lot of anecdotal claims but lack of concrete data. It measures metrics like velocity which includes code commits and lines of code, quality and developer sentiment. The overall goal with the new products is to significantly boost developer productivity. Bansal said using the AI agent approach he expects enterprise developer teams can be up to 50% more productive. He emphasized that while the basic workflow steps remain the same, each step becomes more efficient with AI assistance. This efficiency gain extends beyond coding to testing, deployment, security compliance, and operational management. "How we're looking at it, is can we get efficiencies across the entire workflow of all the things that people have to do, so developers can free up the time from there and now they can spend more time on the creative problem solving side of things," he said.