Harness Cloud Cost Management vs Apptio Cloudability

Detailed Feature Comparison

Harness Cloud Cost Management vs Apptio Cloudability

Summary: 

Apptio Cloudability provides a great set of visibility and forecast tools focused for individual cloud providers, but lacks the all-in-one multi-cloud visibility modern organizations need and have come to expect. They also fall short on automating cloud cost savings features that make saving costs simply and easy. There’s a great deal of manual heavy lifting required to build and maintain good tag hygiene, which is required to fuel their reporting features. They also lack native support for Kubernetes cost allocation, requiring an open source agent to be installed on every Kubernetes cluster in order to get the granular cluster visibility that Harness includes automatically. 

If you’re looking to maximize your cloud cost savings through intelligent automation, and get rich multi-cloud and container cost visibility, Harness Cloud Cost Management is the clear winner. Harness understands the pressure on engineering and FinOps teams to optimize cloud efficiency, along with the requirement to paint a full picture of multi-cloud costs that includes container costs. Harness is a powerful, easy to implement solution that gets customers more value out of the cloud.

Automated Cost Savings:

Getting engineers to take action on cloud cost recommendations shouldn’t be your only path to cloud cost savings. Automation can unlock cost savings opportunities that simply can’t be realized with manual or scripted efforts. Harness CCM has a multitude of automation tools that save our customers money, from idle cloud resource management (Cloud Autostopping) to spot instance orchestration, and more, that saves our customers up to 90% on cloud costs.

Apptio Cloudability acquired Cloudwiry to automate the RI/SP purchases, but it will be some time before this feature is integrated into the Cloudability portfolio (if ever). This acquisition aside, Apptio Cloudability has no native automated cost savings features available for their customers.

Tag Management Required:

Tag management is essential to understanding your infrastructure costs, and having a strong tagging policy is the foundation for cloud asset management. Unfortunately, manual tagging and great tag health is a requirement to get the full value of Apptio Cloudability, and get granular visibility into cloud assets and costs. Apptio Cloudability also won’t update any tag changes to the cloud providers, the changes exist solely within Apptio Cloudability. 

With Harness CCM, there’s no need for manual tagging of cloud resources to maintain excellent tag cleanliness. The Harness Platform automates the creation of cloud infrastructure throughout the CD development pipeline and can automatically provision resources and tag them at creation time.

Time Granularity:

Businesses need to stay on top of shifting cloud costs so that they can catch (and stop) run-away cloud spend as it occurs. A rogue cluster can run up huge cloud bills if not detected quickly. That’s why Harness CCM offers hourly granularity in its cost reporting to give an almost-real-time view into possible issues before they turn costly.

Apptio Cloudability only offers daily granularity into its cost reporting and analysis. For many customers, especially engineering teams, that simply isn’t enough.