Harness Solutions Factory (HSF) is an automation framework that lets platform engineering teams define, publish, and govern reusable Harness resource bundles — and deliver them to developers through self-service, without requiring any Terraform or platform knowledge on the consumer side.
Platform admins author Terraform-backed templates that codify opinionated, repeatable configurations — things like a project pre-wired with environments, RBAC roles, user group bindings, pipelines, and connectors. These live in two places:
- Harness Template Library — Harness-maintained templates reflecting best practices validated by the Center of Excellence, copied locally when HSF is first deployed.
- Custom Harness Template Library — Your organization's own fork, where you can customize or extend any base template to fit internal standards.
Workflows are the user-facing entry point to HSF. As a platform admin, you register your templates as IDP Workflows — a simple form-driven UI. A user selects a workflow in IDP, fills out some details, and submits — no direct platform or Terraform knowledge required.
Out-of-the-box examples include:
- Harness Project Setup — provisions a project with defined name, 3 environments (dev/prod/test), 4 user groups, 2 roles, and 7 user bindings.
- Deploy Harness CI Golden Standard Templates — jumpstarts CI pipeline creation with a best-practice template that can be customized for different build processes.
- Deploy Harness SAST & SCA Templates — deploys account-level step group, stage, and pipeline templates for security scanning.
When a user submits a workflow, here's what happens under the hood:
- A "Create and Manage IACM Workspaces" pipeline runs first to set up the workspace.
- That pipeline also executes the workspace to actually provision the resources.
- Every resource HSF creates is backed by a Terraform workspace in IaCM. Changes go through plan-and-approve cycles, and drift is surfaced in the IDP catalog.
This means every provisioned instance is a live, tracked IaCM workspace — not a one-time script run.
As your footprint grows, HSF gives you two organizational primitives:
- Mini Factory — brings individual "factory" projects for each organization, so workspaces for a given org are co-located under a specific project rather than piling up in a single central project.
- Factory Floor — deploys the core HSF pipelines (Provision Workspace, Drift Analysis, Bulk Workspace Management, etc.) directly into a consumer project, enabling a distributed architecture.
This is where HSF closes the loop on long-term governance:
- Drift detection — a scheduled pipeline runs drift analysis, and any detected drift is surfaced directly in the IDP catalog, so you can see which deployed instances have diverged from their template.
- Managed updates — when Harness releases new versions of HSF templates, a scheduled pipeline creates a pull request in your Custom Template Library. You review and merge on your own timeline — nothing auto-applies.
- Bulk management — the Bulk Workspace Management pipeline lets admins push changes across many deployed workspaces at once, keeping legacy copies aligned with updated base templates.