Last week, I attended the Harness Unscripted conference in London along with my co-founder Russell Luke.

This was the first time the event had been run outside of the US. The turnout was impressive both in terms of the number of people attending and the companies represented.

The Unscripted event is all about diving into the latest trends in modern software delivery, especially how AI is transforming DevOps and making life easier for developers. The conference is a gathering of industry experts to discuss the latest AI-driven innovations, share best practices, and to give us exclusive previews of new features in software delivery platforms.

Keynote by Jyoti Bansal

The event kicked off with a keynote presentation by Harness CEO, Jyoti Bansal, someone we know well from the past. Jyoti was the founder of AppDynamics, a company we had represented in the UK for over a decade, and had acquired our previous generation of database monitoring back in 2013.

In his talk, Jyoti shared the incredible growth Harness has experienced since its launch six years ago.

Their first product, introduced in 2018, was a Continuous Delivery solution tailored for modern DevOps. They quickly added Continuous Integration to their platform the following year. Since then, the list of new features has really taken off. In 2023, they rolled out a Code Repository, an Internal Developer Portal, Infrastructure-as-Code management, Supply Chain Security, and Software Engineering Insights.

Here are some of the impressive numbers the Harness platform has racked up over the past year:

• 55M deployments
• 725M builds
• 8B tests optimised
• 9T flag evaluations
• 1.1M security scans
• $1.6B cloud spend optimised

What’s Next for Harness?

Next up, we had Nick Durkin, the CTO of Harness (another familiar face from our past), hitting the stage to showcase some exciting new products and features—both new on the horizon.

Database DevOps

The big highlight for us was the new Harness Database DevOps solution. We already had a sneak peek since we’ve been collaborating with Harness to integrate it with our DBmarlin platform ahead of the launch.

Deploying database changes is a much harder problem to solve than application changes. This is due to the fact that applications are stateless which means the new version can be swapped out for the old. Databases on the other hand, contain a company’s vital data so any changes or rollbacks must preserve the integrity of that data at all costs.

With Harness Database DevOps, you can now roll out database schema changes and code changes all in the same pipeline. Plus you can use DBmarlin to monitor how those changes affect performance. You can even perform automatic rollbacks on any changes that cause performance issues.

Harness vision: AI Native DevOps

Other exciting announcements included a number of interesting AI-driven capabilities:

• AI DevOps Assistant - this uses AI to build your deployment pipelines and remediate any issues.
• AI Code Assistant - which rivals Microsoft Copilot, and Harness are giving this away for free to customers using any of their other paid-for products.
• AI QA Assistant - define frontend user journeys through your web application using natural language instead of brittle scripts based on CSS-selectors. This means it can automatically adapt to UI changes without having to change.
• AI Productivity Insights - assess the productivity impact of using coding assistants over time in terms of velocity, quality and developer experience.

Customer Presentations: Chase UK & Lloyds Bank

After the product updates, we heard from two banks: Chase UK and Lloyds. What stood out to me was the contrast between them—Chase, being a brand-new bank starting in 2020, had a clear advantage over Lloyds, which is over 250 years old and has at least ‘one of everything’ in terms of technology.

Despite their differences, both banks shared similar struggles with developer productivity. They each explained how adopting Harness and other automation tools cut down on developer busywork and boosted efficiency. Lloyds, for example, mentioned how it used to take 77 days and 50 Jira tickets to onboard a new developer, but thanks to automation, they’ve brought that down to just 34 minutes.

Afternoon sessions

The afternoon started off strong with a presentation by Jen Thomson, Associate VP of Accelerated App Delivery at IDC. Her presentation, “Accelerating Innovation through App-Centric Engineering,” tied in perfectly with the Harness vision we’d seen earlier in the day.

This was followed by various panel discussions on topics such as driving developer productivity with AI, best practices for secure software delivery, and optimising your cloud setup.

The day wrapped up with Jyoti returning to the stage with Srinivasaa HG Vice President at Gold sponsor WiPro.

A nice end to the day

The day wrapped up with a prize giveaway. During the break, three stickers had been hidden under random chairs. After getting down on my hands and knees, I was pretty thrilled to find one under mine. It was a nice little surprise to end an already informative day—walking out not only having enjoyed all the sessions, but with a prize to take home too!