The need for innovation has caused business to speed up software delivery, which, however, is often the antithesis of quality. And the speed versus quality puzzle is not an easy one to solve.

The software delivery startup Harness Inc. tackles this problem with the use of automation, governance and artificial intelligence to improve confidence in the deployment process. Its platform enables enterprises to automate canary verifications, prioritize what tests to run, determine the impact of changes, and automate cloud costs, for example.

“With everything that we deliver, we do this with artificial intelligence and machine learning in mind to remove all of the tasks that we hate,” said Nick Durkin (pictured), field chief technology officer of Harness. “No one wants to babysit deployments; no one wants to sit there and watch tests run that we don’t need to run, and so really taking an artificial intelligence approach to software delivery.”

Durkin spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event. They discussed the state of software delivery and its challenges, as well as how Harness enables velocity, quality and governance through AI-based solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

Improving confidence in software delivery

Harness has found out that the pursuit of velocity is traditionally what drives companies to bring new tools and new technologies on board. While equally important, governance, whether to control internal processes or to meet regulatory purposes, is delegated to a secondary position. And even when agility is achieved with governance, there is still a problem, which is the quality of delivery.

“There’s not enough people at these companies to sit there and look at the knock and understand what normal looks like. There’s not enough people to look at every line of log to understand what’s going on and what broke,” Durkin said. “And this is where you can start leveraging artificial intelligence to understand what does normal look like.”

Starting as a continuous delivery-as-a-service company a few years ago, Harness has grown to become a truly modern software delivery platform and embraces all these variables for efficient software delivery.

Harness’ visual builder enables users to build out the entire process with just a few lines of code. Once the deployment is in place, Harness analyzes data flowing in from data monitoring, logging, testing and security systems and measures the impact of various deployments or code changes. This allows predictions for areas most likely to break down within the process and for recommendations to create the ideal process for each unique pipeline scenario.

New features being introduced to Harness include cloud cost management and feature flags. This set of features aim to bring the confidence that developers can deploy whenever they want and as needed, according to Durkin.

“When we think about software delivery, we think about continuous delivery; we really mean automate everything from start to finish,” he explained. “And that means with all of the guardrails and all the rules that you need for governance so that you can meet those security requirements, you meet those regulatory requirements while still empowering developers.”

High visibility to combat costs

Through its intelligent and automated platform, Harness also promises to solve one of the most feared problems for companies in the cloud, which is cost. After migrating their applications to accelerate their digital transformation, many companies see extensive provisioning, which sometimes results in a bill much higher than expected.

The issue here is all about visibility, according to Durkin. While businesses are empowering developers to do more and more, they are not giving them the inputs they need to do their jobs effectively.

“If you want engineers to care about costs, it’s something they need visibility for. If you want the administrators to function out of a cost mindset, it needs to be something that’s part of their daily information that they have,” he explained.

To fix this, Harness Cloud Cost Management tool empowers engineers with visibility into the cloud costs of their apps, microservices and clusters. It also provides comprehensive resource tracking, with the power of analytics and custom data-driven dashboards. Yet, the platform makes savings recommendations.

“So, if you solve velocity with governance and now even solve for quality, the next thing that you have coming is cost,” Durkin said. “What you want to do is empower the same engineers to know what change they made, what it modified, how it affected it, but also how it affected costs. And if you give that to the engineers and the people that can affect change, it’s amazing what happens.”

Governance for hybrid environments

As data becomes increasingly distributed, a business’ IT infrastructure expands sharply up to the edge, which has the potential to create governance problems. These issues can be avoided with defined processes, policies and procedures that meet enterprises’ governance in any of the environments, according to Durkin.

“The reality is the tooling that you have should allow you or allow your engineers to deploy wherever is needed,” he said. “[If] I want to deploy to say Amazon EKS or EKS Anywhere, and I want to have them physically on the data center or if I want to have them up in the cloud, this shouldn’t be something that our engineers have to care about.”

The idea is for policies to be designed in a way that prevents engineers from misplacing applications and letting them know if an error has occurred so they can fix it.

All of Harness’ offerings, which focus on the pillars of velocity, governance, quality and cost efficiency, aim to help companies wherever they are on their cloud journey.

“Everyone’s looking for one of these four pieces and that is … their bottleneck right now. And [Harness’ platform] is really being able to provide the resolution to any of those bottlenecks out of the gate,” Durkin concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event. (* Disclosure: Harness Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Harness nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE