Harness Cloud Cost Management vs Kubecost

Summary:

At first glance, Kubecost seems to do it all – and while it does excel in multiple ways, it’s important to remember that Kubecost is primarily for Kubernetes costs (as implied by the name). As always, we love giving credit where it’s due: Kubecost monitors costs in Kubernetes fantastically well – but it stops there. For any costs outside of Kubernetes, you may find yourself needing another service…

...or, alternatively, you could go with a product that does both well, like Harness Cloud Cost Management. You probably use too many tools to manage cloud costs already. Why not bring that all into a single pane of glass on the Harness platform?

Full Multi-cloud Cost Visibility:

You wouldn’t drive your car with only half your windshield clean, so why run your cloud with only partial cost visibility?  With Kubecost, you only get cost information for your Kubernetes clusters, which accounts for less than 50% of the cloud infrastructure for most organizations.

Harness provides a premier Kubernetes cost management solution (along with every other kind of cloud cost) on all major cloud providers, including single, multi-, or hybrid cloud environments. We give you deep business context into your costs with Cost Perspectives, providing you with a single view of all containerized and non-containerized workloads by teams, applications, environments, or whichever view makes the most sense for your business. 

Automated Costs Savings:

One of the core benefits of using cloud cost management tools is the recommendations for optimizing the efficiency of cloud infrastructure resources. The challenge that all companies face is making sure that the right engineers are reviewing those recommendations and taking action. It’s much better to create new cost savings opportunities through automation.

Harness goes beyond cost recommendations to actively manage cloud resource idle time effectively with Cloud AutoStopping, without custom scripts or manual engineering effort. Engineers are then free to focus on what matters most: revenue generating application development. We also automate Kubernetes cluster management to orchestrate Kubernetes cluster autoscaling with Spot Instance Orchestration. You can automatically respond to spot instance interruptions, closing the gap in spot instance availability.

Kubecost doesn’t have any automated cost savings tools available for it’s customers, and has only recently released their automatic right-sizing feature in alpha or beta.