Harness, the developer-focused startup from Jyoti Bansal, has been working hard to build a more complete modern tooling platform for developers while taking a distinct shift into open source more recently. That started with the acquisition of Drone.io in 2020.
Today, the company took another open source step with the acquisition of ChaosNative, best known for the open source chaos engineering product LitmusChaos, which has been nurtured by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
While ChaosNative CEO and co-founder Uma Mukkara, writing in a company blog post announcing the deal, said the project was originally geared to Cloud Native projects built on Kubernetes, it has grown into a broader set of chaos engineering tools over time.
“What started out as an effort to provide out-of-the-box chaos experiments for Kubernetes-based microservices, eventually grew into an end-to-end framework to carry out chaos engineering on a wide variety of application and infrastructure targets, with support for multi-tenancy, SLO validation, and custom workflows, amongst other features,” Mukkara wrote in the post.
With ChaosNative, Harness adds another piece to its developer toolkit, one that allows it to pressure-test its projects against worst-case scenarios. The idea is to try and create a set of conditions that could take down your application in order to understand that and prevent it from happening.
Bansal said that it also enhances the set of testing and reliability tools already on the platform.
“With the acquisition of ChaosNative and the addition of Harness SRM (service reliability management) and Harness STO (security testing orchestration), the Harness platform bridges the chasm of velocity, resiliency, reliability and security, empowering developers to rapidly and reliably deliver on business objectives while providing an unmatched developer experience,” he said in a statement.
As with the Drone purchase a couple of years ago, Mukkara said that as part of Harness, it will continue to nurture the open source project while integrating it into the Harness platform and offering commercial versions of the ChaosNative products.
“As part of Harness, we will continue to help maintain the community-first values of Litmus, while delivering on important roadmap items around integrations, newer fault injections/experiments, and an improved chaos dashboard,” Murkkara wrote.
The companies did not discuss a purchase price, but customers will begin to see ChaosNative’s capabilities later this quarter, according to the company.
