devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: Harness

  • Harness Empowers Developers with Cloud Agnostic End-to-End Software Delivery Platform

    AWS GovCloud, Azure and GCP integrations provide DevOps and financial management teams with a CI/CD platform for multi-cloud deployments and complete cost visibility across all of their public cloud resources

    SAN FRANCISCO – April 15, 2021 – Harness, the leading platform for software delivery, today announced end-to-end integrations with Amazon (AWS) GovCloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to help DevOps and engineering teams perform multi-cloud software deployments. Harness was initially developed to deploy pipelines and provide cost management for applications hosted in Kubernetes environments; they are now expanding on that vision with the first CI/CD and cloud cost management platform fully available across the three major public cloud platforms.

    This is extremely important for companies like GoSpotCheck. GoSpotCheck hosts its applications in multiple clouds including AWS and GCP. Consequently, GoSpotCheck had to build and maintain individual pipelines for each cloud, a time-consuming process requiring expertise in the API’s of both providers. These pipelines weren’t agnostic or portable across clouds, stacks, and platforms.

    “Our deployment pipelines were complex and not cloud agnostic.” – Nick Wilson | DevOps Lead

    Today with Harness, GoSpotCheck is able to easily move microservices between clouds with zero downtime. Harness abstracts the interaction with each cloud provider so the deployment is easily switched between clouds providers without requiring knowledge of the underlying API’s. Software Delivery pipelines are agnostic, portable, and dynamic – requiring minimal maintenance by engineers or the DevOps team.

    According to Gartner, more than 81% of organizations running in the cloud use two or more public cloud providers. To compound this, each cloud provider requires dedicated engineering expertise and tools to manage specific cloud provider nuances. This slows down engineering teams that are already burdened with too many tools. Today’s enterprises need a full-stack CI/CD platform that permits them to move seamlessly between the big three public cloud providers (AWS, Azure and GCP), while allowing them to lower cloud costs. Harness enables customers to consolidate their build, deploy, verify, and cost management processes into a single, streamlined platform without worrying about the complexity of a multi-cloud environment.

    “We’re noticing a direct correlation between containerized software deployments and the move toward cloud-native architectures,” said Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder, Harness. “As more enterprises look to do more with their software and reduce infrastructure costs, they’re turning to multi-cloud architectures to improve uptime, avoid vendor lock-in and gain price leverage. With these integrations, Harness is answering that call, providing an abstraction layer between cloud deployment complexity and developers, so every company can deliver next-generation software faster than ever.”

    By granting customers access to all the major public clouds directly, Harness provides the same profound deployment and cost management experiences expected when managing applications hosted on Kubernetes. Harness’ latest integrations with each of the major public cloud providers include:

    Amazon AWS GovCloud

    Developers working in the public sector need to work with tools that fit into their air-gapped regulatory environment. This often means building their own software delivery tools or using the few tools available on the market. Harness already supported AWS ECS, AWS AMI, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Lambda, and more. Now, developers can use Harness to deploy new software to applications hosted in secure government environments, giving customers and their partners the flexibility to architect secure cloud solutions that comply with government regulations and compliance regimes such as:

    • FedRAMP High baseline

    • Department of Justice (DoJ) Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) Security Policy

    • U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR)

    • Export Administration Regulations (EAR)

    • Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (SRG) for Impact Levels 2, 4 and 5

    This integration also allows cloud operations and financial management teams to have complete visibility across all of their public cloud resources.

    Microsoft Azure

    Harness already supported Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS), Azure Web App, and Azure Gov Cloud type workloads. With today’s news, they also support Azure native deployments and cloud bill analysis, providing critical additional capabilities for customers running Harness CI/CD on Azure Cloud. Harness now assists with Azure Serverless technologies and ARM support with blueprints, management, and resource groups. Customers also gain deep visibility into their Azure costs within Harness Cloud Cost Management.

    Google Cloud Platform

    Harness already supported some GCP deployments such as Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Cloud Run Workloads and Google Cloud Functions in the Deployment Templates feature but lacked critical integrations to bring it to feature parity with its AWS offerings. Now, Harness supports the deployment of native GCP applications, and integrates with Google Secrets Manager, Google Key Management Service, Google Cloud Storage, Google Container Registry, Stackdriver, GCP Workload Identity, and Google Cloud Build.

    For more information about how companies can deliver next-generation software on AWS, GCP and Azure, visit harness.io. To join the Harness community of industry-leading partners, apply here.

    About Harness

    Based in San Francisco, Harness is the only end-to-end platform for complete software delivery designed to provide a simple, safe and secure way for engineering and DevOps teams to release applications into production. Harness uses machine learning to detect the quality of deployments and automatically roll back failed ones, saving time and reducing the need for custom scripting and manual oversight. Harness customers include NCR, Kohl’s, Discover Financial, Nationwide Insurance and McAfee. Follow Harness on Twitter or try Harness for free at harness.io.

     

  • Harness Revamps User Interface for CI Platform

    Harness Revamps User Interface for CI Platform

    Harness today announced it has updated the community edition of its continuous integration (CI) platform with, among other updates, a revamped user interface.

    Formerly known as Drone.io, the latest release also adds pipeline execution visualizations, governance and security controls and live CI pipeline debugging capabilities. Harness last year acquired Drone.io, an open source CI project, to extend its existing continuous delivery (CD) platform into the realm of CI. Harness claims there are now more than 50,000 active monthly users of the community edition of Harness CI.

    Brad Rydzewski, co-founder of Drone.io, said the user interface for Harness CI will soon be applied across the entire portfolio.

    The update to the community edition of Harness CI comes at a time when the debate over how tightly integrated CI and CD platforms need to be is heating up. Harness launched a namesake CD platform before it acquired Drone.io to add a CI capability. While most DevOps teams are proficient with CI, the CD side of the DevOps equation has proven more elusive. There are now GitOps advocates that contend the rise of Kubernetes makes it more advantageous to enable a separate CD platform to pull updates from a Git repository, rather than having them pushed out by a CI/CD platform. The challenge with CD has always been that each platform on which code is deployed is unique. Kubernetes, however, now provides a de facto standard layer of abstraction that runs atop multiple platforms.

    Rydzewski said the integrated CI/CD approach will ultimately prevail, because it enables DevOps teams to more easily integrate a range of processes, including testing, that are required to consistently build and deploy applications at scale. Harness is, essentially, making a case for solving the CD challenge using a platform that encourages – but doesn’t require – a DevOps team to replace their existing CI platform.

    Regardless of how DevOps evolves, the CD issue needs to be addressed. As the enterprise becomes more extended with the rise of both cloud and edge computing, the number of platforms a DevOps team needs to support continuously expands.

    Despite the fact that DevOps teams employ CI/CD platforms, it is clear most of those organizations are not overly committed to the way they currently manage CD. It may be years before most organizations finally implement a consistent set of processes for automating application deployment.

    In the meantime, the number of organizations just starting out on their DevOps journey continues to increase. There are still plenty of instances where organizations have yet to deploy any type of CI/CD platform. It’s also worth noting that, in many cases, different DevOps teams within the same enterprise have decided to deploy different CI/CD platforms.

    Regardless of how DevOps evolves the pressure to automate is rising. The challenge many DevOps teams face today is the current platform they are relying on to automate the building and deployment of applications requires a small army of specialists relying on all too often manual processes to maintain.

  • Harness Commits New Dev Experience to its Continuous Integration Open Source Community

    Harness CI Community Edition (aka Drone) now includes pipeline execution visualizations, live debugging capabilities, and enterprise-grade security and governance

    SAN FRANCISCO – March 18, 2021 – Harness, the leading platform for software delivery, today announced major updates to its open source module, Harness Continuous Integration (CI) Community Edition (formerly Drone.io). Along with a new dev experience and user interface designed to mirror Harness’ industry-leading Software Delivery Platform, today’s release provides open source contributors with new pipeline execution visualizations, advanced governance and security controls, and live CI pipeline debugging capabilities, to build and test code in record time.

    Today’s software development and engineering teams waste hours of valuable time and resources waiting on pipeline builds, only to scramble to find a solution when one breaks. To mitigate this frustrating and time consuming cycle, Harness enhanced its marquee open source CI module, with a series of updates that allow developers to quickly respond to failures and create a shorter path back to innovation. Rebranded as Harness CI Community Edition, if a build does break, the developer is now presented with a link to the failed CI server allowing them to debug with ease.

    “Following the acquisition of Drone, Harness made it our mission to provide the OSS community with the investment and tools they need to simplify and accelerate software delivery,” said Brad Rydzewski, CEO and founder of Drone.io. “We’re proud to not only deliver on that message and meet the needs of today’s overburdened engineer, but do so with features that surpass proprietary vendors.”

    Today’s news marks Harness’ first major contribution to the open source software community following its acquisition of Drone in August 2020. Since Drone was founded in 2013, it has earned more than 100 million downloads from DockerHub, boasts 50,000 active monthly users, and is the most ‘liked’ CI/CD project on GitHub with 21,319 likes – 5,500 more than Jenkins, 13,000 more than Spinnaker, and 18,000 more than Jenkins-X. Additional updates to Harness CI Community Edition include:

    • New Dev Experience: A sleek, modern user interface designed to match other Harness product modules creates a smooth transition for developers working between Harness modules.

    • Pipeline Execution Visualizations: Developers can understand exactly what pipeline steps are executing, when, and in what order – all using a visual map. This is an easier and faster way of tracking complex pipelines than reviewing them as text in log files.

    • Live CI Pipeline Debugging: Debugging builds that work on developers’ computers and not on the CI server can be a time consuming and difficult undertaking. With live CI pipeline debugging, developers can solve build failures occurring on CI instances quickly.

    • Enhanced Governance & Security: Managers no longer need to add users and control access to pipelines via a command line or the API. The CI system is managed in a faster and less complicated user interface that is also scalable.

    Harness will continue to invest, innovate and support the open source community with additional OSS announcements planned for 2021. To learn more about Harness CI Community Edition, visit https://harness.io/.

    About Harness

    Based in San Francisco, Harness is the only end-to-end platform for complete software delivery designed to provide a simple, safe and secure way for engineering and DevOps teams to release applications into production. Harness uses machine learning to detect the quality of deployments and automatically roll back failed ones, saving time and reducing the need for custom scripting and manual oversight. Harness customers include NCR, Kohl’s, Discover Financial, Nationwide Insurance and McAfee. Follow Harness on Twitter or try Harness for free at harness.io.

  • Harness Acquires Continuous Integration Pioneer Drone.io and Commits to Open Source

    Acquisition marks company’s entrance into the open source software community and establishes Harness as the complete CI/CD platform for cloud and container-native teams

    SAN FRANCISCO – August 5, 2020 – Harness, the industry’s first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service™ platform, today announced that it has acquired self-service Continuous Integration firm Drone.io, the creator of the popular open-source project Drone. Today’s news enters Harness into the open source software community and establishes Harness as the first self-service CI/CD platform for cloud and container-native applications. The addition of Drone.io’s continuous integration to Harness’ industry-leading continuous delivery platform will enable developers and DevOps engineers to build, test and deploy software on-demand, without delay or downtime.

    As every business becomes a software business, the challenge to build, test and ship software becomes critical. Industry analysts validate that sentiment, with IDC projecting that the DevOps software market will reach $15 billion by 2023. However, there are many DevOps tools on the market that can’t keep pace with today’s modern platforms, processes and engineering requirements. Legacy continuous integration tools like Jenkins were written ten to fifteen years ago—pre-cloud computing—and require teams of engineers to manually script software delivery pipelines, instead of delivering innovation for their business.

    Drone.io fills this gap. Instead of requiring scripts, continuous integration pipelines can be declared and managed as code in Git, which means they have standard syntax, require less work and are easy for engineers to create, use, maintain and troubleshoot. Drone.io plugins are all containerized—and therefore standardized—making them easy to download, use, upgrade and create. Drone.io can reduce the time and cost of continuous integration by 5-10X, so engineers can focus on writing code for the business versus scripting their CI builds, tests and pipelines. To validate this, Drone currently has over 50,000 active community users, including organizations like eBay, CapitalOne, Cisco and VMware, and is one of the most liked CI/CD projects on GitHub.

    “Today’s software developers are under incredible pressure to create and deploy new applications on-demand, yet a lack of automation means their current process is highly manual, time-consuming and error-prone,” said Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Harness. “With the acquisition of Drone.io, Harness will continue to simplify software delivery for developers, and will fully embrace, and commit to, the open source community so that we can accelerate the speed of software delivery together.” 

    “I’m extremely proud of what our Drone community has accomplished, creating the first container-native CI self-service solution that is both simple and scalable for engineers to use. If you look at Harness Continuous Delivery, its DNA is similar to Drone – both are self-service, simple and scalable,” said Brad Rydzewski, CEO and founder of Drone.io. “Together we can take CI/CD to the next level for our open-source and enterprise communities.”

    “With Drone, we can put the power of CI in our engineers’ hands. Drone is simple and scalable, like a Swiss army knife for our few hundred engineers around the world. They can build and run their CI pipelines in containers, independently, without resource conflicts or bottlenecks. We spend less than a few hours a month administering Drone, so it’s a light lift compared to CI tools we’ve managed before,” said Jim Sheldon, Senior DevOps Engineer at Meltwater.

    Harness will continue to invest, innovate and support Drone.io’s open source community, and currently has several internal projects under consideration for open source. As part of the acquisition, Drone will continue to be open-source and free for the community, and will become Harness CI Community Edition. Drone Enterprise will be sold as Harness CI Essentials Edition. Later this year, Harness will introduce Harness CI Enterprise Edition, a next-generation approach to CI that will redefine how engineers build and test code in the cloud.

    To learn more about Drone by Harness, visit https://harness.io/.

    About Harness

    Based in San Francisco, Harness is the industry’s first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service™platform designed to provide a simple, safe and secure way for engineering and DevOps teams to release applications into production. Harness uses machine learning to detect the quality of deployments and automatically roll back failed ones, saving time and reducing the need for custom scripting and manual oversight. Harness customers include NCR, Kohl’s, Discover Financial, Nationwide Insurance and McAfee. Follow Harness on Twitter or try Harness for free at harness.io.

    About Drone.io

    With 21,000+ GitHub stars and a robust, active open source community, Drone is a leader in container-driven Continuous Integration. Drone empowers development teams to deliver software at unprecedented speed. Follow us on Twitter @droneio or on Github for news and product updates.

  • Harness Adds Analytics to CDaaS Platform

    Harness Adds Analytics to CDaaS Platform

    Harness has added an analytics module to its namesake continuous delivery-as-a-service (CDaaS) platform that makes it easier to better align constrained software development resources with business goals.

    Omed Habib, director of product marketing at Harness, said Continuous Insights enables organizations to identify bottlenecks and improve overall software delivery by automatically gathering metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time, mean-time-to-restore (MTTR) and change failure rate.

    The Harness Continuous Insights dashboard

    Habib said the biggest challenge organizations face when it comes to continuous delivery is the delicacy of most IT environments. All the interdependencies between complex systems force IT organizations to rely on manual processes and custom scripts, he said, noting the process of rolling back an application whenever there is an issue can take days and weeks.

    The Harness CDaaS platform provides a more seamless approach to application delivery that automatically detects new builds in GitHub, Bamboo, Jenkins, Artifactory or Nexus repositories or any Git repository. Once the DevOps team is alerted, they can employ graphical tools to not only automate the process of building pipelines using YAML files but also leverage machine learning algorithms to evaluate the quality of a deployment and then automatically roll it back whenever necessary by accessing data from tools such as AppDynamics, New Relic, Splunk, Elastic Search and Sumologic, added Habib.

    Harness comes in three flavors. There is a Professional Edition supported by Harness and a free forever Community Edition. There’s also an Essentials Edition aimed at medium-sized companies that do not require a full set of enterprise and security features. The Continuous Insights analytics module is free for all new and existing customers of the Harness Professional Edition.

    Habib said that despite all the advances being made in terms of DevOps and continuous integration, organizations are still struggling with continuous delivery. Because many of them don’t seem to be able to push code into production as quickly as the code can be built, the pace of innovation within IT environments is being stifled. As business leaders wonder why that pace of innovations has slowed, many of them are now demanding access to application delivery metrics.

    It’s not clear to what degree providing access to those metrics will entice organizations to adopt a CDaaS platform. However, as developers and business leaders alike become more frustrated with the pace of application delivery, a groundswell for change is starting to build. Many IT leaders are now looking to automate as much of the application delivery process to prevent that frustration from morphing into a full-scale mutiny.

    In the meantime, there’s an old adage that says things measured are things done. Not everyone may appreciate all the newfound attention being paid to key performance indicators for application delivery. However, the truth is most organizations are not going to ever really solve the application delivery conundrum until somebody starts producing relevant metrics that enable them to comprehend the true scope of the challenge.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Harness Invests in Automating Continuous Delivery

    Harness Invests in Automating Continuous Delivery

    Fresh off raising an additional $60 million in funding, Harness plans to make more investments in machine learning algorithms to advance continuous delivery through automation.

    Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal said the startup, which he co-founded with Rishi Singh, a former DevOps platform architect at Apple, is now in a position to invest more aggressively in additional engineering and sales resources needed to expand adoption of the cloud-based service, which provides a level of abstraction through which much of the continuous delivery process can be automated using drag-and-drop graphical tools. Bansal and Singh co-founded Harness after AppDynamics, provider of an application performance management (APM) platform Bansal also co-founded and served as chairman of the board, was sold to Cisco Systems.

    Bansal said Harness takes advantage of YAML files and machine leaning algorithms to present DevOps teams a set of visual tools accessed via a cloud service that enables them to build sophisticated pipelines as quickly as 10 minutes. That approach promises to significantly advance DevOps adoption by making it easier for IT operations teams to set up those pipelines as part of continuous delivery process without needing deep programming expertise.

    While there’s been a lot of progress made in terms of driving adoption of best continuous integration practices among developers, the continuous delivery side of the DevOps equation has proved much more difficult to achieve. Most IT organizations rely on multiple platforms that have their own unique attributes. As such, IT operations teams typically have created their own scripts or rolled out automation frameworks such as Ansible to allow them to automate some aspects of the application deployment process.

    However, Bansal noted, custom scripts typically don’t scale very well and usually have not been well-documented. What’s more, frameworks such as Ansible are still too low-level to enable DevOps teams to build pipelines in minutes. The approach Harness has designed enables DevOps teams to describe their intent using a set of visual tools, which then employs machine learning algorithms to automate the deployment process regardless of the underlying platform, he said.

    That approach is further augmented by a set of rules that can be added to make sure security and compliance requirements are met, he noted, adding Harness also provides views into how processes are being automated to provide DevOps teams with the confidence required to trust a highly automated platform.

    Bansal said the goal is to not just make it simpler to build and deploy pipelines, but also maintain them in what have become highly dynamic IT environments where there is simply too much data that needs to be tracked for human administrators to effective manage relying on low-level tools and frameworks. Rather than having to build and deploy the framework needed to achieve that goal, he said, Harness is making it possible to automate the continuous delivery process using a cloud service on demand.

    It may take a while for IT organizations get comfortable with the level of automation being enabled by machine learning algorithms. But like it or not, it’s already becoming apparent the ability to dynamically manage IT at scale is clearly on the cusp of making another significant leap forward.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Harness Teams with Amazon Web Services to Bring Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service to Cloud-Native Applications Harness Announces Availability for Purchase on AWS Marketplace

    SAN FRANCISCO, March 27, 2019 – Harness, a Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform, today announced that it is now available for purchase on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace — giving AWS customers the ability to access Harness’ solution for automating the Continuous Delivery process and delivering artifacts to production quickly, securely, and repeatedly using Machine Learning (ML) and templatized pipelines. Harness has also recently achieved Standard Technology Partner status in the AWS Partner Network (APN).

    Harness brings the power of enterprise Continuous Delivery to DevOps and engineering teams, empowering them to move fast and ship code without the fear of failed deployments. With its Smart Automation technology, Harness helps automate the entire continuous delivery process. By applying unsupervised machine learning to the process — a new technology called Continuous Verification — the platform understands an application’s baseline environment and can initiate automatic rollbacks when irregular activity is detected, avoiding application downtime or widespread failures.

    Linedata is a public company that uses Harness as well as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Fargate for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Route 53, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), and AWS Lambda. “By empowering our teams with self-service, we are able to introduce non-technical business units to the benefits of DevOps methodology, adding direction to speed and quality and embracing BizDevOps (DevOps 2.0),” said Andrey Budzar, Director of DevOps at Linedata. “By leveraging the power of Harness and AWS, we’ve reduced deployment time by 80%, verification time by 80% and strengthened the feedback loop between Engineering and the Business, resulting in massive cost savings while increasing innovation velocity and maximizing value for our customers.”

    “Harness customers are deploying applications at a lightning pace to AWS, and therefore teaming with AWS and joining AWS Marketplace is a natural fit for Harness as we continue to grow quickly and offer our platform to resource-strapped engineering and DevOps teams worldwide,” said Jyoti Bansal, Harness co-founder & CEO. “We see Continuous Delivery as an extraordinarily complicated problem that, today, people are solving using outdated tools: Jenkins pipelines, scripting, and tons of manual oversight. The Harness Continuous Delivery platform is designed for exactly the kinds of complex, cloud-native applications that are the lifeblood of AWS customers.”

    Key features of the Harness Continuous Delivery platform include:

    • Pipeline Builder. Instead of taking hours to build pipelines, DevOps teams can build and execute complete continuous delivery pipelines in minutes with serial or parallel workflows across their applications, services, and environments.
    • Workflow Wizard. Complex deployments become simple with out-of-the-box support for canary deployments, blue/green deployments, and rolling updates on Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, AWS Lambda, and AWS Auto Scale Groups.
    • Continuous Verification. Release teams finally know for sure that deployments succeeded or failed by leveraging unsupervised machine learning to automatically verify application deployments in production. They can detect errors quality and regressions from tools such as Amazon CloudWatch, AppDynamics, New Relic, Splunk, Elastic and Sumo Logic, as well as use the Harness 24×7 ServiceGuard feature to monitor the performance of releases indefinitely.
    • Automated Rollback. Instead of painful, manual rollbacks, Harness can automate rollbacks to the last working artifact version and run-time configuration with no required scripting or code.
    • Continuous Security. Harness bakes in security into every step of the deployment process. Harness uses its SecretStore, built on AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), or deep HashiCorp Vault integration to seamlessly reference secrets across all deployment workflows and pipelines. Harness also keeps full audit trail of every deployment, so teams know the who, what, where, and when behind every action.
    • Real-Time Delivery Analytics. DevOps and engineering team leads now have powerful insight into every application, environment, version, and deployment. Teams can debug deployments in seconds, and role-based access is baked into every part of the platform.

    Harness is free to try for two weeks, and can be accessed directly on AWS Marketplace at https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B07PZY3369.

    About Harness

    Based in San Francisco, Harness is the industry’s first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform designed to provide a simple, safe and secure way for engineering and DevOps teams to release applications into production. Harness uses machine learning to detect the quality of deployments and automatically roll back failed ones, saving time and reducing the need for custom scripting and manual oversight. Harness’ customers include NCR, Soulcycle, Jobvite, Build.com, McAfee, and Home Depot QuoteCenter. Try Harness for free at harness.io.

  • SoulCycle Flexes Its Muscles with DevOps and CI/CD

    SoulCycle Flexes Its Muscles with DevOps and CI/CD

    When SoulCycle wanted to improve application development and deployment, including improving services for customers across its 80-plus indoor cycling centers in the United States and Canada, the company turned to Mark Sost, a veteran developer and engineer who worked at several media companies, including Hearst.

    Over the last two-plus years, Sost, who now holds the title of senior director of engineering at SoulCycle, has built-up the company’s engineering and DevOps teams, increasing the headcount from eight or nine developers to about 40 employees now.

    The first major project was revamping a legacy, LAMP-based stack used to support applications to focus more on a modern platform that could take advantage of DevOps methodologies, as well as continuous integration and continuous delivery practices (CI/CD).

    Sost and his team dubbed this new platform Podium. However, Podium is more than a development platform, Sost explained.

    “Podium became the ethos and the methodology, as well as the architecture and application stack for re-platforming Soul’s technology stack in total,” Sost said in a telephone interview. “We moved from that monolithic to more of a service-oriented architecture. As such, we started to break out functionality on multiple applications.”

    The re-engineering also meant investing in new infrastructure, as well as other cloud-based technologies. This includes a multi-cloud approach.

    While most of the legacy applications have now been moved to Amazon Web Services, SoulCycle also uses Google Cloud Platform for Podium and all new developments. Sost also takes advantage of Kubernetes and Docker for container orchestrations, as well as investments in other managed services.

    Other tools in the DevOps arsenal include Jenkins to run unit tests; DataDog and StackDriver for monitoring and analytics for workflows; combing Travis CI, Cloud Builder and GCR for CI; and technology from startup Harness, which provides CD-as-a-service. Sost called Harness the “last-mile” tool needed for application deployment.

    “For Harness, that’s CD for us,” Sost said. “That’s continuous delivery to our various Podium environments. We’re leveraging it for delivery to all our Podium environments. Everywhere from UAC (user account control) during the code review cycle to QA after merge, to production, load test and everywhere in-between.”

    This revamped approach to application development now means that the SoulCycle engineering team has created approximately 30 different apps over the last 24 months, this includes internal apps used within the company environment, and ultimately to customers using the facilities and equipment.

    Additionally, Podium helps create a more unified architecture to help ensure that the entire team—whether it’s DevOps, QA or the production team—can paint a 360-degree view of the problem that needs to be solved and what the implications are for the business once the solution is put into place.

    This is what Sost and his team call “Podium principles.”

    “When we say that we’re building things with Podium principles in mind, we’re talking about the fact that everything is version-controlled,” Sost said. “We have full test coverage. We have everything in terms of Kubernetes manifests to infrastructure automation written down and version control checks it as part of source code. That applications are conforming to more of that 12-factor methodology and that we’re really focused really heavily on developer empowerment.

    “I think for us, that really is a shift that Podium has introduced; a move from writing the code as an application developer and then throwing it over a wall to an operations person—a QA person—to test it and deliver it somewhere,” Sost added. “Instead, we provide a developer the tools and the patterns of principles to go about controlling more of their application development life cycle all the way through to delivery.”

    The results have helped improve the overall SoulCycle experience for customers, which includes:

    • Reducing deployment time by approximately 80 percent.
    • Instead of one hour, deployments now take one developer 10 to 15 minutes.
    • QA verification has been reduced by approximately 80 percent.
    • It now takes three QA engineers one hour to verify, compared to three to six hours previously.

    At the same time, Sost believes that the Podium approach gives developers more control over their projects and lets them focus on writing good code that creates apps people want to use.

    “It’s more, ‘Now, I know what’s involved with getting my application to people,’” Sost said. “Because at the end of the day, engineers are just concerned with writing things that people want to use. … This is how we’re going to give you more control of the code and applications that you’re writing, so that you can see meaningful results quicker, without having to wait for someone.”

    What’s next for Sost and his team at SoulCycle? The answer: Machine learning and a bit of automation to the DevOps process.

    Here, SoulCycle is using Harness tools to log more data and infrastructure monitoring into the platform, which allows the algorithm to learn more about the various development projects. This can make the code better and eliminate errors that come with constant development and deployment.

    “We’re letting it get smarter over time around how it can detect anomalies and understand whether our code was successful because there are going to be times where things slip through unit testing or slip through integration tests and there are even going to be times where they slip through load tests, where things like 99 percent are just not going to cut it,” Sost said.

    — Scott Ferguson