Want to learn about simplifying the DevOps processes? Dive deep to learn how AI, ML & Automation can take delivery platforms to the next level.
According to Nick Durkin, Field CTO of Harness, “Developer teams are facing increased pressure to deliver software faster, with better quality, and at a higher frequency.” To help resolve these issues Harness has come up with a disruptive solution in the software delivery market. Under the leadership of Nick, the company is building an intelligent software delivery platform that enables engineers to deliver software faster, with higher quality, and with less effort.
Dive in to learn more about this from Nick in the below interview:
Kindly brief our audience about yourself and your journey as the Field CTO of Harness.
I am first and foremost an engineer myself – I have close to two decades of experience building and troubleshooting software and building highly effective DevOps teams for government agencies, financial institutions, and security companies. As the Field CTO of Harness, I’m devoted to helping ease the most burdensome tasks developers face so they can get back to doing what they enjoy most. My team and I are focused on helping developers build and deliver software more seamlessly in a cloud-based world.
Please share your source of inspiration for exploring various facets of technology.
My inspiration comes from being stuck in war rooms, where everyone was guilty until proven innocent and we didn’t get to go home until everything was fixed. That meant nights, weekends, kids’ games, birthdays, date nights, etc all got missed. Harness explores technology to remove the worst parts of people’s jobs. No one wants to babysit deployments or wait for all 3000 unit tests to run when we committed 50 lines of code. No one wants to get a ticket to shut down or bring up servers during off hours. Let’s use a massive amount of ML and a tiny bit of AI to truly remove the worst part of people’s jobs, not the best!
Please brief our audience about Harness and give us an overview of its standout products and services.
Developer teams are facing increased pressure to deliver software faster, with better quality, and at a higher frequency. Harness’ platform provides a simple, safe, and secure way for engineering and DevOps teams to rapidly release applications into production. It uses machine learning to detect the quality of deployments and automatically roll back failed ones, saving time and reducing the need for custom scripting and manual oversight, giving engineers their weekends back. We have eight different modules to help make each step of the software delivery process easier: Continuous Delivery and GitOps, Continuous Integration, Feature Flags, Cloud Cost Management, Service Reliability Management, Security Testing Orchestration, Chaos Engineering, and Software Engineering Insights.
What are the core values on which the organization is formed and what is the mission of the organization?
At Harness, we are driven by eight core values in everything we do to help developers. The first is to be bold, really pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the software delivery space. Secondly, we want to know our customers deeply by tuning in to exactly what they need and how they need it delivered. We’re also really focused on continuously improving, using data and feedback loops to get to the heart of what is and is not working. All of that hard work and growth doesn’t happen without the more human-centered values we espouse of trust, transparency, humility, and celebration – we strive to “remember the human” in every phase of our work. Finally, we call our last value “Get Ship Done” because we are obsessed with shipping top-quality work on time.
Being a thought leader, how do you strategize to bring to light Harness’ mission and vision?
In everything we do at Harness, we do it with the customer in mind. Their business, their corporate goals, and even their individual goals. We are not an “if you build it, they will come” company. We work with the best in every industry to make sure we are always solving the hardest challenges. We communicate openly and honestly – how else can you run a SaaS company? We are not perfect, but we have a growth mindset and we partner with our customers so they are with us the entire way. Finally, it’s a team, one where everyone leans in to help not because it’s in their job requirements but because of the commitment we have to each other to succeed.
In your opinion, how important is it to leverage the power of AI in order to boost business performance?
Recent LinkedIn survey results show that more than half of developers have been spending less than three hours per day writing code. The rest of their workday is spent on plumbing tasks like testing, security management, and container orchestration. Ultimately, an organization will suffer if developers spend less time creating and innovating and more time managing operations. That is why automating those tasks with AI and ML is so crucial – it leaves human developers more time to do the kind of coding and problem-solving that requires human touch and expertise. Companies that are not automating these tasks stand to lose developers, lose business, and lose to the competition. We started Harness with Continuous Verification which uses both ML and AI to stop teams from getting stuck in war rooms. Every module/capability we build includes AI, ML, or Automation. We have a strong stance that AI should be used to remove the worst parts of people’s jobs, not the best part of it.
Having extensive experience in the field, please brief us about the emerging trends of the new generation and how you plan to fulfill the dynamic needs of the ever-evolving space.
Whenever we see “Full-Stack developer” we cringe. The list of requirements has gotten out of hand for what one person is expected to master. We instead see teams coming together in one platform, empowering each team to operate in the same system, and creating a cohesive team, not a divided finger-pointing organization. We see this with the rise of the platform engineer as well as watching both security and finance being involved earlier and earlier in the SDLC. This is almost impossible when each team is operating out of its own tooling as opposed to a platform built for each team to collaborate together.
Why do you think it is important to craft a smarter and humanized AI ecosystem?
Smarter is already here. Humanized is an interesting concept. Right now most AI is professors and not scientists. AI isn’t testing its own theories, that’s where all businesses are focused right now. How do we take the output from this vastly wider dataset and start testing its theories for customers so they can implement the best outcome available to both humans and AI? Adding human-based feedback can do great things if it comes from perfect humans with no bias. There lies the problem.
What would be your valuable advice for budding entrepreneurs and industry professionals?
You have heard something like this a thousand times before but let’s take a different approach. It’s not what you know, it’s who knows you! Be bold, and make sure you leave every interaction with everyone knowing you, your product, and your solution. That way when they have a problem they will call you, not the other way around
Treat everyone like the CEO. Be humble. If every person you meet, you treat them like your own CEO, no one will ever have a bad word to say about you or your work. You will forever continue to learn and grow.
Hire people smarter than you. Hire great people, empower them to do what they are best at, and remove every object in their way.
Make sure everyone you hire is invested in the same “WHY”. Different whys turn into different directions and that can kill companies, and even more important, relationships.
How do you envision scaling both – Harness and your growth curve in the year 2023?
Scaling requires trust. Tons of startups fail because a hero wants to keep control of everything. We at Harness, hire the best talent, empower them to do amazing things, and reward their hard work. We can’t do this without Trust. Innovation stalls when politics get in the way of great ideas. Harness has come out with 8 disruptive modules that could be their own startups in less than 6 years and there are even more coming this year. Customer-focused innovation is what has driven Harness and will continue to do so.
Nick Durkin
Field CTO at Harness
Nick Durkin is Field CTO for Harness.io, a modern software delivery platform designed to make deployments easy, safe, and repeatable for everyone in engineering and DevOps organizations. He is responsible for the organization’s worldwide field engineering team, post-sales engineering team, and a portion of the product. He previously held technical and executive roles in organizations such as OverOps, DataTorrent, and Early Warning. Nick also held the position of the lead architect on the Department of Homeland Security’s FIVICS initiative as well as developed several patents for anti-fraud technologies currently in use among not only the Federal Government but also the world’s largest financial institutions.
