Harness acquires ChaosNative to bring chaos engineering to software delivery

Let the OSS Enterprise newsletter guide your open source journey! Sign up here.

Harness, a continuous integration and delivery platform (CI/CD) for engineering and devops teams, is expanding into chaos engineering with the acquisition of ChaosNative.

Harness is a six-year-old company that offers “continuous-delivery-as-a-service,” leveraging machine learning and AI to automate software deployments, monitor quality, and enable rollbacks if bugs are discovered. The company was co-created by Jyoti Bansal, the founder and former CEO of AppDynamics, which Cisco bought for $3.7 billion back in 2017.

ChaosNative, for its part, was founded by the creators of LitmusChaos, an open source chaos engineering platform that joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) earlier this year — LitmusChaos is used by major companies including Intuit, VMWare, Red Hat, and Mercedes. On top of that, ChaosNative offers an enterprise-grade version called ChaosNative Litmus, which is available as a hosted cloud product and in a self-hosted enterprise flavor.

Chaos engineering

Chaos engineering, for the uninitiated, is a discipline concerned with testing how a system performs under extreme and unexpected conditions, to identify weaknesses before they create a full-fledged outage in a production environment — ensuring resiliency is the name of the game. Several notable players exist in the space, including Gremlin and Verica, which recently closed a $12 million round of funding.

With ChaosNative under its wing, Harness is rolling out a new Chaos Engineering module as part of its core platform, and it’s available in beta from today. Additionally, Harness also now becomes the primary sponsor of the LitmusChaos open source project.

“As enterprises continue to struggle with reliability as a result of ever-increasing scale and complexity of their distributed systems, chaos engineering provides a solution,” Harness CEO Jyoti Bansa said in a statement. “The integration of ChaosNative Litmus into the Harness software delivery platform helps customers easily introduce chaos engineering into their workflows to reduce costly downtime and increase resiliency and security.”