Harness Receives Patent for Cloud AutoStopping: A New Standard for Intelligent Cost Optimization

Idle cloud infrastructure is one of the most persistent and expensive problems in cloud cost management, costing companies an estimated $44.5B a year on underutilized resources. At Harness, we didn’t just build a workaround—we built a smarter way to eliminate it entirely. And now, we’re excited to share that our Cloud AutoStopping technology is officially patented.

This validates a fundamentally new way to tackle one of the biggest challenges in cloud operations today: eliminating idle, wasteful cloud resources without disrupting workflows or adding manual overhead.

Whether you’re a DevOps engineer, a FinOps lead, or an infrastructure architect, understanding what makes this technology different—and why it matters—can help you rethink how to control cloud spend in your own organization.

The Reality of Cloud Waste

Every engineering leader knows the scenario: development environments running 24/7 while teams work standard business hours, staging infrastructure consuming resources between deployment cycles, and test environments sitting idle for days at a time. Traditional approaches to managing this waste—primarily time-based scheduling—create their own problems.

Consider a distributed team spanning multiple time zones. Static schedules that work for one region create barriers for another. A developer in London starting early finds their environment offline. A team in San Francisco working late hits a hard cutoff. The result? Teams either accept the disruption or abandon cost controls altogether, choosing reliability over efficiency.

How Cloud AutoStopping Delivers Intelligent Automation

Cloud AutoStopping is Harness’s proprietary technology that addresses these challenges through dynamic, context-aware automation that responds to actual usage rather than predetermined schedules. The system continuously monitors real-time network traffic and usage patterns, making intelligent decisions about when to power down resources and when to keep them available.

Unlike traditional methods, which rely on static, time-based schedules that can be inflexible and error-prone, AutoStopping leverages real-time traffic analysis and usage patterns. This lets the system make nuanced, context-aware decisions about when to stop and start resources, based entirely on actual demand.

This technology is an integral part of Harness Cloud Cost Management (CCM), working seamlessly alongside other optimization and governance capabilities to deliver continuous, automated cost savings. By embedding AutoStopping within CCM, organizations can manage, optimize, and govern cloud costs holistically, without disrupting day-to-day operations.

The result is a solution that dramatically reduces cloud waste while maintaining a seamless user experience and zero manual intervention.

Measurable Impact Across Team Structures

The results speak to the effectiveness of this approach. Organizations typically see 60-70% reductions in non-production cloud spend—even teams with co-located members working similar schedules. 

Non-production environments—such as development, testing, staging, and QA—often account for up to 80% of cloud infrastructure in some organizations. Yet these environments are also the most underutilized, frequently running when no one is actively using them. This creates massive waste that traditional tools fail to address. Cloud AutoStopping’s intelligent automation ensures that resources in these environments only consume what’s truly needed, when it’s needed.

For globally distributed teams, the impact is even more significant. Cloud AutoStopping scales resources precisely to match actual demand across time zones, eliminating the choice between cost efficiency and team productivity.

The Broader Impact on Cloud Operations

This patent milestone reflects Harness's commitment to advancing intelligent automation in cloud operations. As organizations increasingly adopt cloud-native architectures and distributed development practices, the need for sophisticated cost management tools becomes critical to sustainable growth.

Cloud AutoStopping represents a new category of cost management—one that adapts to actual usage patterns rather than requiring teams to adapt to rigid cost controls. This approach enables organizations to optimize costs without compromising the developer experience or operational reliability that modern software delivery requires.

This kind of flexibility is becoming even more important as the way we build and run software keeps evolving. With the rise of AI, faster release cycles, and increasingly complex infrastructure, old-school cost management tools—things like static schedules or manual processes—just can’t keep up. Teams need smarter, automated solutions that adjust in real time, without creating extra work or slowing anyone down.

Looking Forward

As organizations face increasing pressure to optimize cloud investments while maintaining development velocity, solutions that provide both cost efficiency and operational excellence become essential.

Harness remains committed to pushing the boundaries of intelligent, automated FinOps—helping engineering and finance teams work smarter, save more, and focus on what really matters.

Want to see Cloud AutoStopping in action?

Schedule a demo to explore how it can reduce cloud waste without disrupting your teams – or join us at the FinOps Excellence Summit to hear how leaders are driving cost efficiency through automation.