Harness and OpsMx : Different Approaches to Modern CD (Continuous Delivery)

Modern Continuous Delivery

Enterprises are under pressure to deliver applications faster. A Modern CD Platform is needed to to continuously deliver, deploy and verify applications and deployments. Both OpsMx and Harness serve this customer need.

Modern CD platforms:

1. Continuously Deliver & Deploy Applications (CD): Fully automate multi-cloud deployments and rollbacks, and also automate delivery pipelines.
2. Continuously  Verify (CV): As applications pass through different stages to  production, they need to be verified for security, compliance, performance and errors  in each stage & production.  Continuous Verification automates this  verification, reducing the friction of human intervention and failures due to errors.

Approaches to Modern Continuous Delivery

There are two primary approaches to building Modern Continuous Delivery : Open-approach and Closed-approach.

1. Closed-approach: Closed approach platforms are closed source and supported by a single vendor. Harness has chosen the Closed approach. Harness platform is built on proprietary CD + CV features.
2. Open-approach: Open-approach platforms are based on Open Source with a large community and eco-system. OpsMx has chosen the Open approach. OpsMx (OES) is based on Open Source Spinnaker and built enterprise features including  best in class Continuous Verification (CV). OpsMx CV works with most CD platforms.

Comparisons of Open (OpsMx) Vs Closed (Harness) Approaches

In the short term both closed and open approaches  can be made to meet customer requirements. In the medium to longer term the approach  you choose will impose certain constraints on enterprises and will lead to fundamental differences in capabilities. A well know example, Internet is based on an Open Approach and today the world is a beneficiary of its transformative power. Open-approach platforms differ from closed/proprietary in the following ways

• Flexible & Extensible Product: Spinnaker is flexible, extensible and built to scale. Spinnaker is used for continuous delivery in both large and small enterprises.
• Community and Eco-System: Spinnaker solution is supported by the a vibrant community (7000+ and counting) including development directly by the cloud vendors like AWS, Google, Azure, and Pivotal to keep the project up to date and achieve high velocity. Spinnaker is now part of Continuous Delivery Foundation/Linux foundation.
• Integrations: Open-approach is conducive for supporting large number of integrations and cloud infrastructures. It is very difficult and expensive for closed-approach to have a large number of integrations.
• Best Practices & Innovation: Open-approach fosters sharing of best practices and innovation

Why enterprises choose one over the other?

OpsMx has been in bake-offs and many enterprises such as Cisco choose the Open-approach. Reasons why enterprises may choose one over the other are:

• Feature Velocity: Harness solution is developed and supported by a single vendor. That vendor controls the velocity, roadmap, and deliverables. On the other hand, the Spinnaker solution is supported by the most vibrant community (6000+ and counting) including development directly by the cloud vendors like AWS, Google, Azure, and Pivotal to keep the project up to date and achieve high velocity. Features such as the recently approved OpsMx Spinnaker Operator for Kubernetes and OpenShift increase the feature velocity.
• Vendor Lock-in: Harness is a single vendor proprietary solution and hence a vendor lock-in. Many enterprises are trying to avoid vendor locked-in solution to maintain flexibility and price leverage with the vendor. OpsMx OES (OpsMx Enterprise for Spinnaker) solution is based on a widely adopted, and community-created open source spinnaker solution with no vendor lock-in.
• Product Maturity: Spinnaker, on which OpsMx is based, has been adopted by large enterprises and operates at scale. Enterprises using Spinnaker include Netflix, Waze (Google), Intuit, Pure Storage, Cisco, Target, etc. (see the full public list here). Netflix has more than 9000 pipelines and 5000 deployments a day. Along with 1000s of open source contributions by eco-system players like Google, AWS, etc. the product has matured
• Cost & Support: Closed-approach leads to a high overall cost. On the other hand, Open-approaches lead to less overall-cost and a larger talent pool to support and innovate.

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