Cloud cost management is crucial in today's dynamic, data-driven environments. As businesses leverage the cloud to store vast amounts of data, run applications, and streamline operations, costs can spiral out of control without diligent oversight. The decentralized nature of cloud use often makes it difficult for businesses to monitor and optimize costs, leading to inefficiencies and wasted resources.
There are many tools available to help businesses manage their cloud costs, so how do companies know who to turn to for help? The answer is industry analysts who constantly monitor the market and provide expert insight into available solutions. They delve into the technical nitty-gritty, offering insights that may not be readily available to the average customer. By taking into account the features, customer service, ease of use, and, importantly, cost management capabilities, analyst reviews can help prospective customers make informed decisions.
GigaOm is one such analyst that has published an in-depth, forward looking analysis of cloud cost management, the GigaOm Radar for Cloud FinOps v2.0. Harness is proud to be included in the report, showing our strength in our position on the radar.
Why Harness?
Harness has taken the lead in automating cloud cost savings, with many innovative features that can’t be found in other products. We’ve been growing continuously, and GigaOm recognized this with their inclusion of Harness in their report. While we are still classified as a Challenger, it won’t be long before Harness’ performance and feature innovation propels us to leader status.
As the GigaOm report states, Harness is among the Innovative/Platform Play quadrant vendors that “are expanding their FinOps functionality and are poised to capitalize on these capabilities as part of their overall strategy.”
The Harness CCM Difference
Automation is at the core of everything that Harness does for our customers, across our entire Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) platform. We focus on creating cost savings opportunities that can’t be found via manual efforts, and reduce the burden and toil on engineering teams to take action of cloud cost reductions. Let explore more:
Cloud AutoStopping™
Harness was among the vendors to be rated Exceptional for Identification of Cost Optimization Opportunities, with our Cloud AutoStopping feature being called out as a strength for Harness. With this feature, Harness customers save up to 80% on their non-production cloud infrastructure by proactively managing idle development resources.
GigaOm notes “Harness’ ability to automatically stop and start instances behind the scenes is key to long term cost savings with minimal impact to users.”
Cloud AutoStopping automatically detects when cloud resources have been idle, stops them according to user set policies, then auto starts those resources when engineers access them. Compared to scheduled shutdowns, these idle times can occur at any time of the day (lunch anyone?), and Cloud AutoStopping will save up to 40% more on idle resources then a schedule.
In Depth Kubernetes Support
Kubernetes is a fundamental tool for cloud native architectures to enable flexibility and scalability for cloud workloads. But they can be a challenge when it comes to understanding usage and costs.
As GigaOm noted in their Harness summary, few vendors are as deep as us in our ability to rightsize Kubernetes clusters, and our Cluster Orchestrator and Cloud AutoStopping for Kubernetes clusters are key features for our customers to increase cluster availability while reduce infrastructure costs.
If you are using a separate tool for understanding your shared cluster costs from the rest of your cloud reporting, it’s probably time to investigate an all-in-one solution for your cloud costs.
Dynamic Cost Perspectives
Historically, finance owned cloud cost reporting, and pulled information from their cost tool of choice to generate custom reports for their teams. FinOps best practices, however, focus on getting all affected team members direct access to the information they need, in the perspective that makes the most sense for their needs, at the right time.
Harness makes this happen through our Cost Perspectives and Cost Categories, which together give our customers a strong ability to dive deep into their cloud costs, across all of their cloud infrastructure. These features are key to Harness receiving an Exceptional rating for Real Time Decision Making in the Key Criteria for FinOps.
Taking the Next Step
If you would like to read the full report, Harness is happy to share. With Harness CCM, you can save more on your cloud costs. Contact us to find out how.