Harness Cloud Cost Management vs Azure Cost Management

Detailed Feature Comparison

Summary

Azure Cost Management provides a good set of visibility, savings, and forecast tools for Azure, and visibility into AWS (for a fee). As a free tool available to Azure customers, it provides the basics that finance teams and budget owners would want to know. However, they fall short in providing support for multi-cloud setups and container orchestration outside of AKS, which is where the world is headed. To fully leverage the capabilities of Azure Cost Management and get a deep understanding of costs, there’s an inordinate amount of tagging required, and customers find themselves lacking support for day-to-day operations. Azure Cost Management is built for point-in-time views into costs, not for the daily toil that goes into efficient cloud cost management.

If you’re looking for rich multi-cloud and container cost visibility, optimization and governance, Harness Cloud Cost Management is the clear winner. Harness delivers automated cloud cost savings features that don’t exist in Azure Cost Management, as well as deep visibility into multi-cloud and Kubernetes costs. Our Cloud Asset Governance provides proactive cost optimization and guardrails for future cloud spend. 

Multi-Cloud Cost Visibility and Optimization

We live in a multi-cloud world, and understanding your cloud costs across all of your cloud providers is an essential requirement for most firms. Visualizing costs by resource, region, and management groups is a minimum requirement when assessing cost management tools.

Azure Cost Management does have support for creating connectors into AWS accounts, so they can give customers unified views of cloud costs by cloud provider, as well as importing that data into their Power BI tool for more advanced cost analytics. Unfortunately, this is where their multi-cloud support stops. They do not provide cost recommendations for AWS resources, nor recommendations for AWS SP/RI commitments, which one should reasonably expect when they are being asked to pay for AWS support.

Harness delivers true multi-cloud support, giving powerful cost visibility via Cost Perspectives and Categories that allow users to create granular, business specific views of multi-cloud costs. We can also provide recommendations across all cloud providers, as well as Kubernetes clusters.

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. 

Azure Cost Explorer doesn’t include any specific support for viewing AKS cluster costs, and can only statically allocate shared costs at a management group or subscription level. Given the dynamic nature of shared cluster usage, this is a major gap in cost visibility. You also won’t get any cost optimization recommendations from Azure Advisor, which is fairly limited in the scope of resources it can cover. 

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.

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 Commitment Orchestration, which save our customers up to 90% on cloud costs when used together

The only savings automation that Azure (in general, not Cost Management) provides is an option to auto-renew savings plans and reserved instance contracts. There is no intelligence built-in to understand what *should* be renewed, and once a savings plan is renewed, it can not be canceled. Customers could be stuck with contracts that no longer meet their needs, leading to cloud cost waste.