Harness delivers enterprise continuous integration on heels of Drone.io acquisition

In August, Harness made its first acquisition when it bought open-source continuous integration startup Drone.io. The company didn’t waste any time building on that purchase, announcing a new enterprise continuous integration tool today to go alongside the open-source project Drone has been building.

The Harness software development platform consists of various modules, and the latest one helps with continuous integration, which is the build and test process that happens before developers start deploying their code changes.

As Brad Rydzewski, co-founder at Drone.io, explained it at the time of the acquisition:

Drone is a continuous integration software. It helps developers to continuously build, test and deploy their code. The project was started in 2012, and it was the first cloud-native, container-native continuous integration solution on the market, and we open sourced it.

Bansal indicated at the time of the acquisition that he wanted to build on that open-source project and provide an enterprise commercial version, while continuing to support the open-source project.

“This is really the first product in the industry that is bringing AI and machine learning into optimizing the build and test process,” Bansal said. That intelligence layer is what separates it from the open-source version of the software, and the idea is to use machine learning to speed up the building and testing process.

The company is also announcing a new module around managing feature flags. These are elements developers leave in the code to limit the rollout of software, allowing them to see how the update is performing before rolling it out to the user base at large. The problem is as these flags proliferate, they become difficult to manage, and the new module is designed to help developers understand and control the flags that exist in their code.

Bansal says his goal for the company has been to put within reach of every developer the kind of automated software delivery pipeline that’s in place at the world’s largest tech companies.

“[Our goal] is that every company in the world can have the same level of software delivery sophistication as a Google or Amazon or Facebook,” Bansal said.

Bansal founded AppDynamics, a company he sold to Cisco in 2017 for $3.7 billion. He launched Harness later that same year. The company has raised almost $80 million on a valuation of $500 million, according to PitchBook data.

Bansal also started the venture capital firm Unusual Ventures in 2018 and, as though he doesn’t have enough to do, he launched his third startup, Traceable, a security company, in July.