How Harness’ Continuous Delivery Helps Vitamin e-Tailer Bloom

For its IT operations, iHerb, a premium online purveyor of health supplements and beauty products, has both a cloud presence — using Kubernetes-based cloud native technologies — and physical servers at its fulfillment centers.

The company is always adding new features to its site, as well as looking for ways to reduce latency on site, said Bob Chen, the technology and operations executive for the e-tailer.

The goal is to help customers “browse through our site better find the products that they need and know,” as well as to “smooth out and simplify the checkout process,” Chen said.

Continuous Integration as a Service

“Technology, obviously, is a big portion of that process,” Chen said. The company is also constantly improving its build processes.

As a result, the e-commerce site requires a robust continuous delivery system.

Originally, iHerb used Jenkins, but “that was an area where we found could have a lot of improvements, especially with what is currently available,” Chen said.

The company decided it wanted to move to a hosted solution, and after evaluations, went with Harness.

iHerb looked at the in-house CD services from both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, but preferred Harness because it could work not only with cloud providers but also in-house servers as well.

iHerb currently uses the company’s continuous delivery (CD) module and its Cloud Cost Management (CCM) module.

The CD module runs the workflows built by the development team to push updates to the website.

Harness also works with HashiCorp Terraform, which iHerb uses for its Infrastructure as Code IT deployments.

It’s All About the Templates

If you are building an airport, you don’t build a runway for each airplane, noted said Nick Durkin, field CTO at Harness, in an interview with TNS.

Instead, you build different runways for different airlines, depending on how much room they need to take off and land.

This is the idea for Harness’ templates, which offer pre-configured reusable content, logic, and parameters for creating build pipelines in Harness. Every piece of an operation is designed as a template.

It prevents developers from doing the wrong things, while giving them the info to do the right things, Durkin said.

For instance, Harness integrates with most all major security tools, and has the expertise built in so that they pop up “at the right time,” Durkin said. Continuous delivery scanners scan code before they are turned into images. Image scanners scan images before they are rendered into containers. Only after the images are contained are they scanned by container scanners.

Each step can be designed as a template, or an entire stage or an entire pipeline can be a template.

For iHerb, the IT department defines its own deployment workflows, making it easier to onboard onto Harness. “This was a big enabler,” Chen said.

Overall, the module-based approach makes it easy for the company to enhance its own operations. “There’s a lot of weight to that value,” he said.

Continuous Cost Management

The cost containment module gets data from the continuous delivery module, allowing the company to better handle its cloud costs, Chen said.

The power of the CCM is that is aggregates usage from different cloud sources, as well as from in-house sources.

“So here’s my AWS spend, with my GCP spend, with my Azure spend, right? Understanding where those are, and I can dive in on all the pieces,” Durkin said. CCM can also point out spikes in cost and any other anomalies.

This understanding can then help the organization better allocate their budget against the multiple sources.

“Once you actually have a perspective, then I can start building budgets on top of it,” Durkin said.