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San Francisco-based software provider Harness has brought an upgraded version of its Cloud Cost Management (CCM) platform to market. Utilizing intelligence and automation to decrease cloud expenses while also offering employees at all levels with visibility into how those costs are broken down, the Harness platform updates include four core components geared at optimizing cloud costs.
Harness is assisting in the automated reduction of cloud expenses at a time when they are constantly growing. Harness’ new features will help cloud users only pay for what they use.
“Our own engineering team uses these new capabilities and they were able to reduce AWS non-production spend by 25% and Azure non-production spend by 50% – saving more than $125,000 annually,” said Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Harness. “Most companies realize their cloud costs are astronomical, but how they turn it around is the hard part. Our new features provide transparency, optimization and governance and can unlock cost savings and more information to inform business decisions than ever before.”
New Features and Improvements
Four main components of the updated Harness platform are aimed at lowering cloud costs:
- Intelligent Cloud AutoStopping (released in June 2021) – Allows businesses to decrease cloud computing waste associated with software delivery “by up to 75%” automatically
- Cloud Cost Business Intelligence (new feature) – Unlocks the value in cloud cost data and delivers deep insights to help companies make better decisions
- More Kubernetes Optimization (new feature) – Surfaces Kubernetes optimizations at the node level to assist clients in realizing larger, quicker savings – up to 40%
- Cost Perspectives that include recommendations, anomalies, and waste (improvement) – On a single page, clients may get tailored cloud cost information – all the information they need, and none they don’t
“With cloud computing, what you mostly pay for is not what you use, but what you’ve allocated that sits idle. It can be very tricky to cut that waste down and optimize it,” said Dheemanth Ramesh, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Discover Dollar. “Harness’ Cloud Cost Management brought a huge benefit to our cash flow. We’ve easily saved 60-70% of our bill.”
Harness’ intelligent cloud cost management eliminates idle costs, allowing customers to pay only for what they use, and provides tailored recommendations for where to optimize the infrastructure based on idle or unallocated resources, reducing waste and toil associated with cost savings implementation.
Second, consumers may obtain more value from their cloud with less work and pay just for the services they utilize. Clients would receive an accurate forecasting model by connecting cost centers to budgets, which enables budget owners see how they’re moving and when they need to take action.
Finally, it fosters a collaborative cost management culture across finance, engineering, and FinOps, while also leveraging business intelligence to break down barriers and simplify the process for all stakeholders.
To sum up, Harness Cloud Cost Management would give organizations:
- Transparency – CCM delivers contextually relevant visibility into cloud expenses across AWS, GCP, Azure, and Kubernetes, allowing them to be understood and presented at any level of the company, from high-level business intelligence to individual resource level.
- Optimization – Engineers may jump directly to implementation using Harness’ built-in validation and cost vs. performance customization. Engineers may also automate the management of idle resources without incurring any risks. When cloud prices unexpectedly rise, CCM provides rapid anomaly detection, allowing customers to track down the source and resolve any issues, avoiding costly cost snowballs that would otherwise be hidden until the end of the month.
- Governance – The budgeting and forecasting features of Harness Cloud Cost Management keep teams accountable for their spending and help them avoid budget overruns ahead of time. As part of the comprehensive Harness software delivery platform, customers can establish and enforce cost policies for their cloud infrastructure, even incorporating them into their CI/CD pipelines.
