Cloud AutoStopping™ - Active Management of Idle Cloud Costs

Keeping cloud costs low is difficult at best, and seemingly impossible at the worst. While there are ways for teams to reduce cloud costs, it often isn’t a continuous process, and between monthly or quarterly cleanups, a lot of idle resource waste can easily accumulate.

With the new Cloud AutoStopping capability for Harness Cloud Cost Management, manually managing idle cloud costs is a thing of the past. Cloud AutoStopping marks the first time that Harness is taking on actively managing customers’ cloud costs, saving them up to 75% on their non-production cloud environments.

It’s set it and forget it at its best.Keeping cloud costs low with platforms like AWS Cost Management and Azure Cost Management is difficult at best, and seemingly impossible at the worst. While there are ways for teams to reduce cloud costs, it often isn’t a continuous process, and between monthly or quarterly cleanups, a lot of idle resource waste can easily accumulate, increasing your cloud bill.

With the new Cloud AutoStopping capability for Harness Cloud Cost Management, manually managing idle cloud costs is a thing of the past. This innovative cloud finops capability, Cloud AutoStopping, marks the first time that Harness is taking on actively managing customers’ cloud costs, saving them up to 75% on their non-production cloud environments.

It’s set it and forget it at its best.

Manual Cloud Cost Management Is Inefficient

Until now, Harness Cloud Cost Management provided the ability to understand utilized, idle, and unallocated costs, and could recommend workload optimizations to bring down those idle costs. However, the burden largely still fell upon customers to validate and implement those recommendations, as well as find infrastructure optimizations on their own to achieve more efficiency on a larger scale. While Harness Cloud Cost Management made it easier to validate recommendations so that customers could skip straight to implementation, that was still it - customers had to do the implementing themselves.

What this meant for customers is that they inevitably ended up playing catch-up on their infrastructure optimizations and left efficiencies (and money) on the table. It also made it more difficult to justify the value of the tool, in addition to creating more barriers to adoption for others within that organization. 

Imagine this: You are responsible for cloud costs. You just bought a tool that showed you immediate savings, and you’re excited to keep that momentum going and roll out the tool across other teams in your organization. But one problem is that you don’t own all of the infrastructure; you’re getting great results for what you do own, but getting others to act on it is hard! Add to that that they’re now expected to learn a new tool, trust its data that might not have the right context for its savings recommendations, and then go and implement those recommendations… not a great look. What’s more, they have to commit their engineers to doing all of these things.

That’s not to say that recommendations aren’t valuable, they’re extremely valuable but they require user intervention to realize the value. The next step in the evolution of cloud cost management is the automatic realization of value through intelligent active cost management.

What if it could just be easy to realize savings? What if it could be automated? What if it was seamless to the end user?

Automation and Active Cloud Cost Management

Before Cloud AutoStopping, the only other option to solve these problems was the use of static resource schedulers (third party tools or in-house scripts). But this solution has many limitations, often making it an ineffective or infeasible option:

• Impossible to statically predict idle times, especially during work hours.
• Teams can’t access stopped machines with forceful shutdowns.
• No optimization of compute, only start/stop actions.

Cloud AutoStopping solves the problems of idle cloud wastage and automated cost savings. Customers can now run non-production workloads on fully-orchestrated spot instances and turn them off whenever idle, saving on cloud costs to the most granular extent possible. It’s a dynamic solution to a pressing customer problem, or set of them. In particular, Cloud AutoStopping enables customers to solve for the following use cases:

• Automatically detect idle times and shut down (on-demand) or terminate (spot) resources.
• Automatically restart resources whenever there is traffic or usage requests.
• Stopped/terminated machines are always accessible using the same access patterns that the team is used to - DNS link, SSH, RDP, background tasks.
• Enable running workloads on fully-orchestrated spot instances without worrying about spot interruptions.

Together, this helps customers achieve savings that are 2-3x that of any static resource scheduler, with none of the access issues. It also significantly reduces the barrier to adoption across an organization. Instead of having to learn a new tool, constantly monitor costs and alerts, and manually implement cost savings, teams are empowered to hook up their infrastructure once and continue to reap the benefits without any additional effort.

Pretty good for a set and forget, right? Customers who embrace this cloud finops automation can typically see up to 75% savings in their non-production cloud environments!

"We tried building something in-house because we couldn’t find a solution for a long time and this was perfect for what we needed. The total savings we’ve been able to bring in is easily 60-70% of our bill.”

Dheemanth R, CTO, Discover Dollar

How to Get Started

Cloud AutoStopping is now available for users of Harness Cloud Cost Management. You’ll see a new menu item in your left-hand navigation.

As you get set up with Cloud AutoStopping, watch this short 2-minute video to get an overview.

Once you’re at the dashboard, here’s a handy video that’ll walk you through how to set up your first rule, and show you around the other features of Cloud AutoStopping. Happy saving!