What Puts Harness Among 10 Top Providers in Cloud Cost Management

It wasn’t too long ago (Q3 2020) that we introduced Harness Cloud Cost Management (CCM) to address a growing problem of out of control cloud costs driving the need for better cloud cost management tools. With so many of our customers moving to cloud-native infrastructure, giving them the ability to automate and improve the efficiency of their architecture was a natural fit to our product portfolio, and we knew we could deliver a better cloud cost management experience.

That’s why we’re thrilled to make our debut appearance in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Cost Management And Optimization, Q3 2022. With so many vendors entering this exciting industry, being named as one of the “10 providers that matter most” is a great honor for us. 

Forrester noted in the report, “Harness has seen impressive growth as a company,” and our Harness CCM module is a major part of that growth. Meanwhile, our customers have saved millions on their cloud cost spend while we continue to innovate and automate how cloud cost management should work. 

The Harness CCM Difference

First and foremost, Harness CCM is focused on saving money for enterprises that are running their SaaS businesses in the cloud. We’ve introduced innovative features like Intelligent Cloud AutoStopping and Kubernetes cluster right-sizing that leverage AI/ML to  automate cost savings for our customers. Indeed, Forrester noted in their report that, “among its competitors, few are as deep in these capabilities,” as Harness. 

Let’s explore these features a little more.

Automating Cost Savings with Cloud AutoStopping

One of the single biggest sources of cloud cost waste is idle cloud resources, especially in development and test environments. Even worse than idle development resources are production resources that were provisioned, but never deployed.  While Harness CCM finds these idle and unused resources and provides recommendations on how to address them, in the time it takes to find the responsible engineers to take action on the recommendations, cloud costs continue to spiral. In response to this challenge, Harness introduced Cloud AutoStopping to proactively take action, stopping out of control cloud spend before it can happen.

Cloud AutoStopping eliminates wasted spend on idle resources by automatically identifying and halting them in real-time based on customer policies. With AutoStopping, our customers can:

• Automatically detect idle resource times (such as non-working weekends) and shut down (on-demand) or terminate (spot) resources,
• Automatically restart those resources (hello, Monday!) when traffic or usage requests are detected,
• Enable workloads to run on fully orchestrated spot instances without worrying about spot interruptions.

All of this happens transparently to the customer, with all machines remaining available via the same access path regardless of whether they’re active or stopped.

Going Deep into Kubernetes Clusters

Harness Cloud Cost Management was built with container cost optimization as the primary focus. The same way that complexity in cloud costs is abstracted away for non-Kubernetes workloads, Harness Cloud Cost Management paints an easy-to-understand picture of an organization’s Kubernetes costs.

In particular, Harness Cloud Cost Management simplifies the entirety of the overarching cost management strategy, providing a solution for cost visibility, cost savings, and cost forecasting. By using Harness, CloudOps teams are implementing each of these  three legs of cost management for Kubernetes and creating a strong feedback loop, letting management, finance, and engineering teams rest assured that CloudOps is doing right by both performance and cost.

For those looking to go deeper into Kubernetes,  you can learn more in our Cost Management Strategies for Kubernetes eBook.

It’s All About Perspective

Harness CCM Perspectives is a feature that allows users to group resources in ways that are more meaningful to business needs, whether they are finance, CloudOps or engineering users. It provides a unified view of your multi-cloud cost data, with the flexibility to manage governance and provide contextual optimization opportunities. Cost visibility, budgets, and recommendations can all be viewed from the perspective that matters to each individual user. 

Perspectives can be built from any combination of cost categories (whether by team, application, environment, etc.) that gives users the best view into cloud spend. This includes getting detailed information about shared cluster costs, allowing users to drill down to the Kubernetes or ECS cluster, namespace, node/instances, workload/task, or label level. 

Beyond improved visibility into costs, Perspectives make it straightforward to get to the root cause of the costs and cost anomalies by combining cost information with savings recommendations to ensure the right people have the information they need to manage their business. 

What’s Next?

Harness CCM has been in the market for only two years, but we’re already among the top 10 providers in cloud cost management…and we’re only getting started. 

If you think you should be getting more from your cloud cost management solution, then it’s time to take a look at Harness CCM.  You can try it free, or talk to one of our experts to learn more about how Harness CCM can help you.