Harness Cloud Cost Management vs CloudZero

Detailed Feature Comparison

Harness Cloud Cost Management Vs. CloudZero

Summary

CloudZero provides strong visibility into costs across multiple cloud environments beyond just AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. They’ve developed a unique system for importing costs from third-party cloud providers such as Snowflake, NewRelic, MongoDB, Databricks, and more that can give their users a more complete view of their application spend. As with many vendors (like Harness), they can normalize these costs and present them in views that match their users' business contexts.

However, if you want to save money, and not just count it, then you’ll need to look beyond CloudZero, as they don’t have any automated cost savings features built-in, and their recommendations only apply to AWS (and in fact, you must be an AWS user to use CloudZero.) They’ve partnered with 2 other firms for cost-savings automation features, but that then requires their customers to manage two or three vendors, not one. 

Harness is your one-stop for all your cloud cost visibility, optimization, and governance needs, providing native automation that can help you save up to 80% on your cloud costs. 

Cost Optimization

You don’t want to just see your cloud costs, you want to reduce your costs and have the best cloud efficiency possible for your cloud spend across your multi-cloud environments, preferably with strong automation built-in to reduce the burden for your engineering teams.

CloudZero primarily focuses on cost visibility, which has left its cost optimization features lacking. The Cloud Advisor tool that is meant to surface cost savings opportunities remains in beta. Their Insights focus on AWS savings opportunities only, and it’s likely you’ll get the same level of information from AWS directly. In order to provide automated cost savings, CloudZero requires you to bring third-party vendors on board to provide AWS Spot Instance Orchestration (Xospere) and Savings Plan/Reserved Instance contract management (ProsperOps). They have no native capabilities to automate cloud cost savings.

Harness goes beyond just recommendations to deliver a fully integrated set of tools for automating cloud cost management. Our Commitment Orchestrator automatically manages your savings plan and reserved instance commitments based on your savings goals, and leverages your RI commitments when making resource recommendations. Our Cloud AutoStopping feature allows you to proactively manage idle cloud resources, shutting them down when not in use, and bringing them back up when needed. With Spot Instance Orchestration built in, our Cloud AutoStopping can save customers up to 80% on idle cloud resource spend.

Kubernetes Support

Cloud-native infrastructure relies on Kubernetes to manage shared cluster resources. You need strong insights into cluster usage and savings opportunities to maximize your cluster performance. 

CloudZero can provide visibility into Kubernetes spend across multiple environments, but it can’t give you detailed insights into your Kubernetes clusters outside of AWS. Even on AWS, they require both a cluster agent and AWS CloudWatch in order to gain the telemetry needed to allocate shared costs correctly. They provide some basic recommendations for the underlying cluster infrastructure, but can’t help you optimize your node pools to match your actual usage.

Harness gives you deep visibility into your Kubernetes spend across all your multi-cloud environments (including on-premises clusters) with cost perspectives that match the way you do business. Our recommendations are granular to the workload and the node pool configurations to fully optimize your clusters. We can also automate cluster management with Cluster Orchestrator, which can both autoscale clusters as well as integrate native spot instance orchestration for cluster instances.

Cloud Event Correlation

It’s a developer's world, and the features and applications that they bring to market drive your company's revenue. But wouldn’t it be great to understand the cost of deployments, as well as the impact of new features on your cloud costs? 

To correlate feature releases or engineering deployments with changes in cloud costs, a cloud cost management tool needs to have context behind an organization’s continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. CloudZero provides insight into cost changes as they correlate to deployments via their integrations into continuous integration (CI)/CD tools. However, we are unsure how they assign this context to specific cost anomalies.

Harness ties right into a customer’s pipelines to make the correlation between deployments and cost changes as changes happen, with full visibility into where that context is pulled from.