Harness Cloud Cost Management vs AWS Cost Management

Detailed Feature Comparison

Summary

AWS Cost Management is a free suite of products that includes AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost Categories, AWS Budgets, AWS Trusted Advisor, and AWS Cost Anomaly Detection. Together these products help AWS users understand their cloud spend and provide basic support for rightsizing AWS EC2 instances. For many organizations with small cloud deployments, these tools will work well enough for their needs. While free, there are usage limits to many of the AWS Cost Management features, which even small to medium-sized cloud environments can easily exceed. 

Larger organizations with multi-cloud environments across Azure and GCP, as well as cloud-native Kubernetes architectures, will be left needing to find other tools to understand and optimize those cloud costs. Even within a pure AWS environment, you’ll need to leverage multiple AWS tools in order to get the functionality fully built into Harness CCM, and you’ll still lack the automation that Harness CCM delivers to save you up to 70% on your overall cloud bills.

Multi-cloud Cost Visibility

With over 60% of organizations having some or all of their workloads spread across multiple cloud providers, it’s critical that cloud cost management tools have the ability to track and report on all multi-cloud costs for an organization. As expected, AWS Cost Management tools only support AWS infrastructure.

Harness provides granular cost visibility for AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as Kubernetes deployments on these cloud providers as well as on-premises, all delivered in easy-to-consume reports and dashboards customized to your users’ business needs. 

Kubernetes Support

Cloud-native deployments depend on Kubernetes to deliver scalable and powerful services that can be deployed on shared infrastructure. The challenge, though, is getting the full picture of what portion of shared clusters are consumed by different teams or applications. AWS Cost Explorer can provide a single monolithic charge for your EKS/ECS cluster spend, but what it can’t do is break down those shared costs into something usable, and it won’t give you any recommendations for optimizing those costs.

Harness not only gives you deep insights into shared cluster costs, but we also provide detailed rightsizing recommendations at the workload and node pool levels. We can also help automate your cluster autoscaling to take advantage of spot instances via our Cluster Orchestrator feature, saving up to 90% off on cluster costs.

Savings Plans and Reservations

AWS provides significant savings for their customers who pre-purchase their compute instances (reserved instances) or commit to an overall level of spend (savings plans). They even do a good job of providing RI purchase recommendations based on your cloud spend. However, what they don’t do is give you any recommendations on savings plan purchases, nor help automate the management of these contracts for you.

Harness not only gives you detailed recommendations for both reserved instances as well as savings plans, we also automate the contract execution over time to relieve your teams of that burden. Simply set your coverage goals for both convertible RIs and savings plans, the payment terms that you want, and Harness takes over, making monthly purchases to keep your contracts in line with current usage and coverage goals.

Cost Anomaly Detection

One minor configuration error can result in massive bill shock if it’s not caught and addressed quickly. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection (yet another tool) does provide the ability to set up cost anomaly alerts across several different dimensions. However, the alerts are most likely not as granular as you need them to be, and they have hard limits on how many alerts can be configured per account. There’s also a challenge in that they require admins to do their homework to determine what their anomaly thresholds should be, which can lead to either missed cost anomalies or so many anomaly reports that true alerts are lost in the noise.

Harness cost anomaly detection uses multiple statistical analysis methods to get to the most accurate cost anomaly alerts, cutting out the noise that other tools create. Our alerts lead your engineers exactly to the source, and we can provide root cause analysis for actions taken upstream in your development pipeline that may have led to the cost spikes.