Harness Unveils General Availability of Artifact Registry
Harness has officially introduced the Artifact Registry, signaling a transformative approach to artifact management within the framework of secure software delivery.
Initially a strategic initiative within Harness, Artifact Registry was cultivated by a specialized team operating under the premise that artifact management should be seamlessly integrated into developers’ workflows rather than functioning as a standalone system.
The endeavor resembled an entrepreneurial venture within the organization, heavily influenced by direct customer insights and guided by a dedicated leader with a unified vision.
The team quickly recognized that clients preferred a consolidated solution, rather than a hodgepodge of disparate tools for artifact storage, open-source dependency governance, and vulnerability assessment.
Currently, Artifact Registry accommodates various formats such as container images, package ecosystems, and AI artifacts, encompassing Docker, Helm (OCI), Python, npm, Go, NuGet, Dart, Conda, and beyond.
Enterprise teams are adopting it uniformly across Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines, curtailing the proliferation of registries and alleviating the challenges associated with managing diverse artifacts outside of their delivery frameworks.
Notable incidents, such as the SolarWinds breach or the Shai-Hulud 2.0 events, underscore a crucial reality in the business landscape: risk factors often infiltrate the software development lifecycle at its inception.
When artifact storage, open-source compliance, and security scanning are executed via separate systems, oversight becomes disjointed. This fragmentation leads to delayed responses, inflated operational expenditures, and escalated vulnerabilities.
Harness identified a pivotal opportunity to refine and fortify this paradigm. By integrating artifact management within the Harness platform, the registry becomes an intrinsic control mechanism throughout the delivery lifecycle.
Jasper van Rijn, Head of Software Engineering at Drax Group, remarked, “Harness is facilitating a unified source of truth for all artifact types, both containerized and non-containerized, ensuring that each software component is rigorously verified prior to production deployment.”
The efficacy of Artifact Registry is further enhanced through the Dependency Firewall, which serves as a registry-level enforcement mechanism at the point of dependency intake.
Rather than relying solely on subsequent CI scans after a package has integrated into a build, the Dependency Firewall assesses dependency requests in real-time as artifacts enter the registry.
This allows for the automatic barring of components associated with known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), licensing infractions, excessive severity ratings, or untrusted upstream origins before they are cached or utilized by pipelines.
The announcement of General Availability signifies that Artifact Registry has become a foundational element of the Harness platform.
Interested parties can sign up for a demonstration to observe how Harness Artifact Registry facilitates the efficient distribution of artifacts while integrating security and governance on a large scale.
Source link: Cybersecurity-insiders.com.
