How Burst SMS improved DevOps with Harness

How Burst SMS improved DevOps with Harness

As a company, Burst SMS takes a lot of pride in continuously improving our software. We do a lot more than just measuring twice and cutting it once, but that kind of attention to detail meant that our deployment speeds were sometimes a challenge. Not wanting to risk the reliability of our system, we leveraged Harness to solve this issue.

What is Harness?

Harness is a fully automated Continuous Deployment orchestration tool as a service, abstracting away the intricacies of deploying software to the cloud. Harness plans to expand on this offering with a series of other DevOps specific tooling to create an advance ecosystem for orchestrating all areas of building, deploying, managing & monitoring software. Unlike other tools, Harness works out of the box and doesn’t take 2 years and a full team to build out a pipeline.

How did Burst leverage Harness?

Prior to adopting Harness, our DevOps had no continuous integration (CI) or continuous delivery (CD). We were deploying our code updates every few months in large sizes. We would address any issues right away, but it was a labour intensive process. Ultimately, we wanted to be able to increase our deployment speed and frequency.

  • Definition: Continuous Integration
    Continuous Integration means automating the integration of code changes from multiple sources into one code repository. It’s a time saving method that helps by identifying conflict early, so the issue can be fixed sooner rather than later.
  • Definition: Continuous Delivery
    Continuous Delivery refers to automated testing that checks to see if the changes made will cause any issues before they are implemented. The automated testing from Harness prevents regressions when new code is applied, and the rolling deployments and monitoring ensure that code changes can be rolled back if something goes wrong.

We looked at a lot of options including Jenkins and Jenkins X solutions, but we wanted something that was quick and easy to implement. Ultimately, we landed on Harness because it addressed our key challenges, and the resource and time requirements for implementation were within our scope.

The Result

Harness implemented a stable and reliable build and deployment process. In particular, the CI/CD platform increased our deployment speed. This system allowed our DevOps to make changes more efficiently, without having to know the intricacies of Kubernetes or any other cloud provider. With continuous integration, we no longer have to wait to merge the work of all our developers. Automated testing allowed for continuous delivery with minimal manual interference, something that has been very difficult to adopt in the past.

Harness did exactly what a Continuous Deployment pipeline should do. The implementation process was very easy, and it took far less time to adopt CD/CI into our deployment process than it would have with any other system. Ultimately, Harness improved the efficiency of our DevOps development processes, and we’re very happy to have chosen them as a partner.

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