Harness launches IDP 2.0 to boost developer speed & security
Harness has launched version 2.0 of its Internal Developer Portal (IDP) with a suite of updates designed to improve software delivery speed, quality, security, and the overall developer experience at enterprise scale.
The latest release builds on the Backstage framework, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, and rolls out new features directed at large organisations. The update targets issues seen in previous portals, such as managing complexity, providing scalablility, and unifying fragmented developer experiences.
Enterprise-focused enhancements
Key additions in the updated Harness IDP include fine-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), which provides tighter security and compliance. The RBAC system allows platform teams to specify exactly who can read, create, edit, delete, or execute particular services or workflows at a granular level. For companies in regulated sectors such as finance or healthcare, this is an essential tool for governance.
The release notes, "In large organisations, access boundaries must be explicit. IDP now supports entity-level granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), so platform teams can define exactly who can read, create, edit, delete, or execute a given service or workflow. For companies in regulated industries, like financial services or healthcare, this level of control is essential for compliance and risk management. Imagine a company whose services require restricted access due to regulatory constraints. With RBAC, only the compliance engineering team can modify those entities, while broader developer groups can view, but not alter, related documentation or dependencies."
The updated portal has also been integrated with real-time Git synchronisation, supporting webhooks for immediate updates to YAML configuration files. This eliminates the need for polling or manual refreshing and supports OAuth and central tokens for flexible authentication across all major Git providers.
Harness explains, "For organisations with large, distributed engineering teams, keeping the developer portal in sync with Git can quickly become a bottleneck. Harness IDP now supports real-time updates via webhooks when YAML config files are updated in Git, eliminating the need for polling or manual refreshes. Teams can also make edits directly in the portal UI and push those changes back however they prefer, either directly or through a pull request. Authentication is flexible, with support for OAuth and central tokens, and it works with all major Git providers."
Usability for large teams
The new release aligns the entity organisation in the Harness-Native Platform Hierarchy, mapping catalog entities and workflows to real-world structures such as project, organisation, or account-level groupings. This enables tailored visibility for teams according to their functional or geographic targets, reducing clutter and the risk of error.
Harness states, "Harness IDP now aligns with our native platform hierarchy, enabling teams to create catalog entities and workflows at the Project, Organisation, or Account level. This mirrors how engineering teams are actually structured - by product line, business unit, or geography - so developers see only what's relevant to their work."
In addition to architectural changes, the user interface of the portal's catalog has been redesigned for greater clarity and efficiency. Developers are now able to filter services based on specific relevance, such as ownership or technology, and view integrated scorecards within the catalog. Metrics include service maturity, security compliance, and readiness for production.
On this point, the company shared the comment, "With this release, the IDP catalog has been redesigned for speed, clarity, and scale. Teams can now filter views based on what matters to them, like services they own or APIs used across the organisation. Scorecards are now built directly into the catalog view, giving developers and platform teams immediate visibility into key metrics like service maturity, security standards alignment, and production readiness. Each entity page clearly shows scope, ownership, and references, making it easier for teams to stay organised and aligned."
Onboarding and automation
The update introduces a guided, form-based approach to creating and managing catalog entities, in addition to continued support for YAML-in-Git workflows. The shift is aimed at easing barriers for engineers unfamiliar with configuration syntax and fostering wider platform adoption. The company remarked, "Catalog entities can now be created and managed directly through the Harness IDP UI using a guided, form-based experience – no YAML required. This removes a major barrier for developers unfamiliar with configuration syntax, making it easier for more teams to get started and contribute. For those who prefer a config-as-code workflow, the traditional YAML-in-Git approach is still fully supported."
For larger-scale organisations that depend on automation, Harness IDP now offers additional APIs allowing automatic catalog entity creation, auto-discovery, CLI integration, and Terraform provider support. Harness noted, "While UI is great for onboarding or making quick updates, large-scale adoption often demands automation. Harness IDP now includes new APIs to create and manage catalog entities, unlocking use cases like auto-discovery, auto-population, CLI integration, and Terraform provider support. The existing Catalog Ingestion API remains unchanged and will continue to function as before."
Backstage plugin compatibility
The IDP continues to extend compatibility with Backstage open-source plugins and supports teams seeking to build bespoke plugins on the framework. The company wrote, "Harness IDP continues to extend the Backstage open-source framework, so teams can keep using the Backstage plugin ecosystem they already know, or build their own custom plugins. Best of both worlds!" "With this major release of Harness IDP, we're redefining what an enterprise-grade internal developer portal can be. Extended from the Backstage framework and supercharged for scale, Harness IDP now delivers real-time Git synchronisation, true org-level hierarchy, API-first extensibility, and the most powerful RBAC system in the category. Whether you're supporting 100s or 1,000s of developers, Harness IDP gives platform teams the structure, speed, and control they need to transform developer experience at the enterprise level – without compromise."
The series of updates are positioned to support organisations looking to scale software delivery without increasing risk or operational overhead for developer and platform teams.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Techday NZ
2 days ago
- Techday NZ
Harness launches IDP 2.0 to boost developer speed & security
Harness has launched version 2.0 of its Internal Developer Portal (IDP) with a suite of updates designed to improve software delivery speed, quality, security, and the overall developer experience at enterprise scale. The latest release builds on the Backstage framework, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, and rolls out new features directed at large organisations. The update targets issues seen in previous portals, such as managing complexity, providing scalablility, and unifying fragmented developer experiences. Enterprise-focused enhancements Key additions in the updated Harness IDP include fine-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), which provides tighter security and compliance. The RBAC system allows platform teams to specify exactly who can read, create, edit, delete, or execute particular services or workflows at a granular level. For companies in regulated sectors such as finance or healthcare, this is an essential tool for governance. The release notes, "In large organisations, access boundaries must be explicit. IDP now supports entity-level granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), so platform teams can define exactly who can read, create, edit, delete, or execute a given service or workflow. For companies in regulated industries, like financial services or healthcare, this level of control is essential for compliance and risk management. Imagine a company whose services require restricted access due to regulatory constraints. With RBAC, only the compliance engineering team can modify those entities, while broader developer groups can view, but not alter, related documentation or dependencies." The updated portal has also been integrated with real-time Git synchronisation, supporting webhooks for immediate updates to YAML configuration files. This eliminates the need for polling or manual refreshing and supports OAuth and central tokens for flexible authentication across all major Git providers. Harness explains, "For organisations with large, distributed engineering teams, keeping the developer portal in sync with Git can quickly become a bottleneck. Harness IDP now supports real-time updates via webhooks when YAML config files are updated in Git, eliminating the need for polling or manual refreshes. Teams can also make edits directly in the portal UI and push those changes back however they prefer, either directly or through a pull request. Authentication is flexible, with support for OAuth and central tokens, and it works with all major Git providers." Usability for large teams The new release aligns the entity organisation in the Harness-Native Platform Hierarchy, mapping catalog entities and workflows to real-world structures such as project, organisation, or account-level groupings. This enables tailored visibility for teams according to their functional or geographic targets, reducing clutter and the risk of error. Harness states, "Harness IDP now aligns with our native platform hierarchy, enabling teams to create catalog entities and workflows at the Project, Organisation, or Account level. This mirrors how engineering teams are actually structured - by product line, business unit, or geography - so developers see only what's relevant to their work." In addition to architectural changes, the user interface of the portal's catalog has been redesigned for greater clarity and efficiency. Developers are now able to filter services based on specific relevance, such as ownership or technology, and view integrated scorecards within the catalog. Metrics include service maturity, security compliance, and readiness for production. On this point, the company shared the comment, "With this release, the IDP catalog has been redesigned for speed, clarity, and scale. Teams can now filter views based on what matters to them, like services they own or APIs used across the organisation. Scorecards are now built directly into the catalog view, giving developers and platform teams immediate visibility into key metrics like service maturity, security standards alignment, and production readiness. Each entity page clearly shows scope, ownership, and references, making it easier for teams to stay organised and aligned." Onboarding and automation The update introduces a guided, form-based approach to creating and managing catalog entities, in addition to continued support for YAML-in-Git workflows. The shift is aimed at easing barriers for engineers unfamiliar with configuration syntax and fostering wider platform adoption. The company remarked, "Catalog entities can now be created and managed directly through the Harness IDP UI using a guided, form-based experience – no YAML required. This removes a major barrier for developers unfamiliar with configuration syntax, making it easier for more teams to get started and contribute. For those who prefer a config-as-code workflow, the traditional YAML-in-Git approach is still fully supported." For larger-scale organisations that depend on automation, Harness IDP now offers additional APIs allowing automatic catalog entity creation, auto-discovery, CLI integration, and Terraform provider support. Harness noted, "While UI is great for onboarding or making quick updates, large-scale adoption often demands automation. Harness IDP now includes new APIs to create and manage catalog entities, unlocking use cases like auto-discovery, auto-population, CLI integration, and Terraform provider support. The existing Catalog Ingestion API remains unchanged and will continue to function as before." Backstage plugin compatibility The IDP continues to extend compatibility with Backstage open-source plugins and supports teams seeking to build bespoke plugins on the framework. The company wrote, "Harness IDP continues to extend the Backstage open-source framework, so teams can keep using the Backstage plugin ecosystem they already know, or build their own custom plugins. Best of both worlds!" "With this major release of Harness IDP, we're redefining what an enterprise-grade internal developer portal can be. Extended from the Backstage framework and supercharged for scale, Harness IDP now delivers real-time Git synchronisation, true org-level hierarchy, API-first extensibility, and the most powerful RBAC system in the category. Whether you're supporting 100s or 1,000s of developers, Harness IDP gives platform teams the structure, speed, and control they need to transform developer experience at the enterprise level – without compromise." The series of updates are positioned to support organisations looking to scale software delivery without increasing risk or operational overhead for developer and platform teams.
Scoop
2 days ago
- Scoop
Datadog's Internal Developer Portal Boosts Engineering Autonomy And Helps Ship Code With Confidence
Press Release – Datadog Datadog IDP accelerates incident response by bringing a live, centralised engineering knowledge base into every incident for faster triage, better decision making and improved coordination. AUCKLAND – JUNE 12, 2025 – Datadog, Inc. (NASDAQ: DDOG), the monitoring and security platform for cloud applications, today at DASH launched its Internal Developer Portal (IDP), which is the first and only developer portal built on live observability data. Engineering teams are under pressure to ship faster while still meeting stricter standards to keep their code reliable, secure, cost effective and compliant with legal, regulatory and company policies. Developers must navigate an expanding set of requirements—including code quality, testing, security scans, infrastructure configurations, observability and compliance. At the same time, they need to understand the systems and services their code depends on, who owns these services, and how they're performing in real time. As this complexity and cognitive load grow, developers increasingly rely on platform engineers to unblock them, which stretches resources for both teams and slows software delivery across the organisation. Datadog IDP gives developers the autonomy to ship quickly and confidently—while meeting production standards and keeping pace with constantly changing systems. Unlike static portals that rely on manual upkeep, Datadog IDP builds on its APM product suite to automatically map services and dependencies, and bring Datadog's real-time performance, service ownership and engineering knowledge together in one place. The new product enables developers to build, test, deploy and monitor software with self-service actions and built-in delivery guardrails, while providing platform engineers with scorecards to help them meet reliability, security and monitoring standards. Datadog IDP accelerates incident response by bringing a live, centralised engineering knowledge base into every incident for faster triage, better decision making and improved coordination. Engineers can focus on solving issues—rather than searching for them across disparate systems—by leveraging these capabilities as part of Datadog's unified platform: Software Catalog: A live system of record showing what software is running, who is responsible for it, and how it is performing across an organisation. This record is automatically synced to live telemetry collected in Datadog, so teams can easily find services, dependencies and their performance metrics, along with critical engineering context such as owners, on-call rotations, source code, runbooks, dashboards and documentation. Self-Service Actions: Pre-built, pre-approved templates powered by Datadog's App Builder and Workflow Automation make it quick and easy for developers to accomplish tasks—like scaffolding a new service, provisioning infrastructure resources or triggering remediation actions—independently while meeting internal requirements. Scorecards: A set of out-of-the-box and custom pass/fail rules that allow platform engineers and engineering managers to track compliance with reliability, security, observability, cost, and other standards across services and teams. Engineering Reports: Out-of-the-box visibility into engineering reliability, software delivery performance and compliance with engineering standards, while offering actionable, personalised views for developers, team leads and executives. 'Datadog's IDP brings together both observed and declared system states, as well as existing systems of record. This combination shows not only developer intention but also what is actually in production. Whether developers onboard new teams or are tasked with complex projects such as migrating code from EC2 to Kubernetes, Datadog automatically provides visibility into their systems and reflects changes as they are being made—without stale metadata or manual syncing,' said Michael Whetten, VP of Product at Datadog. 'Datadog IDP empowers developers to collaborate more effectively and deliver software that meets their organisation's standards, at the pace that is expected from them.' Datadog IDP's service ownership and other information are available across Datadog's unified platform. Status Pages, for example, leverages the same ownership metadata populated through IDP to make it easy to communicate incident scope and impact to stakeholders. And on-call engineers can now query service owners, recent changes and other critical information hands-free from IDP for faster investigations using a Voice Interface. To learn more about Datadog IDP, please visit: Datadog IDP was announced during the keynote at DASH, Datadog's annual conference. The replay of the keynote is available here. During DASH, Datadog also announced launches in AI Observability, Applied AI, AI Security and Log Management. About Datadog Datadog is the observability and security platform for cloud applications. Our SaaS platform integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management, user experience monitoring, cloud security and many other capabilities to provide unified, real-time observability and security for our customers' entire technology stack. Datadog is used by organisations of all sizes and across a wide range of industries to enable digital transformation and cloud migration, drive collaboration among development, operations, security and business teams, accelerate time to market for applications, reduce time to problem resolution, secure applications and infrastructure, understand user behavior and track key business metrics.
Techday NZ
3 days ago
- Techday NZ
Datadog unveils IDP to boost developer autonomy & speed
Datadog has introduced its Internal Developer Portal (IDP), billed as the first developer portal built on live observability data, aiming to support engineering teams under increasing demands for faster and more reliable software delivery. Engineering teams reportedly face rising pressure to deliver code that is not only fast and secure but also compliant with legal, regulatory, and internal policies. In this environment, developers are expected to manage a broad span of requirements, including code quality, testing, security scans, infrastructure configurations, observability, and compliance—while also understanding dependencies and real-time system performance. Increasing system complexity and corresponding cognitive load mean that developers increasingly depend on platform engineers to resolve bottlenecks, which, according to Datadog, can slow down software delivery as both groups tackle resource constraints. According to the company, the Datadog IDP is designed to grant developers greater autonomy, enabling them to ship updates quickly while adhering to established standards. The IDP relies on Datadog's Application Performance Monitoring (APM) suite to automatically map services and dependencies. This creates a real-time, unified view of performance, service ownership, and relevant engineering information. The product allows developers to build, test, deploy, and monitor software through self-service actions that include built-in guardrails for delivery. Meanwhile, platform engineers can use scorecards to track compliance with criteria such as reliability, security, and monitoring standards. Capabilities Datadog IDP incorporates several core features designed to support these objectives. The Software Catalog offers a continually updated record of organisational software, including ownership, real-time performance metrics, and links to documentation, dashboards, and source code. The catalog is automatically synchronized to Datadog's telemetry stream. Self-service actions are provided via pre-built templates, facilitating tasks such as provisioning infrastructure or triggering remediation steps without the need for direct intervention from platform engineers. These templates are powered by Datadog's App Builder and Workflow Automation tools. Scorecards, part of the IDP, allow for the setting and monitoring of pass/fail rules in areas such as reliability, security, observability, and cost, with options for both standard and custom criteria. Engineering Reports provide visibility into reliability, performance, and compliance status, supplying targeted views for team leads, developers, and executives. "Datadog's IDP brings together both observed and declared system states, as well as existing systems of record. This combination shows not only developer intention but also what is actually in production. Whether developers onboard new teams or are tasked with complex projects such as migrating code from EC2 to Kubernetes, Datadog automatically provides visibility into their systems and reflects changes as they are being made—without stale metadata or manual syncing," said Michael Whetten, VP of Product at Datadog. "Datadog IDP empowers developers to collaborate more effectively and deliver software that meets their organisation's standards, at the pace that is expected from them." The company states that IDP also enhances incident response by providing a live, central knowledge base for quicker triage and decision making during service outages or other technical incidents. This information is integrated with other tools across the Datadog platform, such as Status Pages, which uses the same ownership metadata to communicate incident scope and impact to stakeholders. Additional functionality includes a voice interface, enabling on-call engineers to query service owners, review recent changes, and access other relevant information hands-free for faster diagnostics and investigations using data from the IDP. The launch of Datadog IDP coincided with the company's announcements in areas including AI observability, applied AI, AI security, and log management.
