Mastering Cloud Savings with Harness Commitment Orchestrator

Mastering Cloud Savings with Harness Commitment Orchestrator

Co-author: Sandeep Hari Hara Bhat

Table of contents

As organizations increasingly migrate operations to the cloud, managing and optimizing cloud expenditures becomes paramount. AWS offers cost-saving opportunities through Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs). However, the complexity of effectively managing these commitments across various regions and accounts can lead to challenges such as over-commitment or underutilization. Managing them effectively requires deep expertise, continuous monitoring, and strategic decision-making. Harness’s Commitment Orchestrator addresses these challenges by providing enhanced visibility and intelligent orchestration of cloud commitments.

This blog explores how Commitment Orchestrator delivers unprecedented visibility into your cloud commitments and intelligently orchestrates them to maximize savings while minimizing risk.

What is Commitment Orchestrator?

Commitment Orchestrator is Harness’s advanced solution for managing AWS commitments (Savings Plans and Reserved Instances) throughout their lifecycle. Unlike basic recommendation tools, Commitment Orchestrator provides comprehensive visibility into existing commitments and intelligent orchestration capabilities that continuously optimize your commitment portfolio.

At its core, Commitment Orchestrator empowers organizations to:

1. Gain holistic visibility into their AWS commitment landscape
2. Make data-driven decisions about new commitment purchases
3. Optimize existing commitments to maximize utilization and savings
4. Automate commitment management through intelligent orchestration

The Commitment Orchestrator offers two core value propositions:

1. Visibility: Provides deep insights into AWS commitments and cloud cost efficiency.
2. Intelligent Orchestration: Automates the management of new and existing commitments seamlessly.

Let’s delve into each of these in detail.

Visibility: Comprehensive Insights into Cloud Commitments

Effective cost optimization begins with a clear understanding of existing commitments and their utilization.

The Commitment Orchestrator offers comprehensive visibility through four key pillars:

1. Coverage

Understanding your compute coverage — the percentage of eligible compute resources covered by Savings Plans and Reserved Instances — is critical for identifying optimization opportunities. Commitment Orchestrator offers:

• Unified coverage metrics across all regions and linked accounts
• Granular visibility into coverage by commitment type, instance family, and service
• Historical coverage trends to identify patterns and gaps
• Clear forecasting of coverage impact from expiring commitments

2. Utilization

Purchasing commitments is only half the equation — utilizing them effectively is equally important. Commitment Orchestrator provides:

• Real-time utilization metrics for both Savings Plans and Reserved Instances
• Detailed breakdowns of utilization by account, region, and instance type
• Early alerts for under-utilized commitments
• Root cause analysis for utilization issues

3. Compute Spend

Controlling cloud costs requires a complete understanding of your commitment investments. Commitment Orchestrator delivers:

• Comprehensive visibility into commitment-related spending
• Breakdowns of on-demand vs. committed spend
• Amortized cost reporting for accurate financial planning
• Projected spend based on current and recommended commitment strategies

4. Savings

Ultimately, commitments are about maximizing savings. Commitment Orchestrator quantifies your financial benefits through:

• Realized savings from existing commitments compared to on-demand pricing
• Potential savings from recommended commitment purchases
• Optimization opportunities to increase effective savings rates

Orchestration: Intelligent Management of Cloud Commitments

While visibility provides the foundation, Commitment Orchestrator’s true power lies in its intelligent orchestration capabilities. This goes beyond basic recommendations to actively optimize your commitment portfolio through two key approaches:

1. Optimizing Net New Coverage

Commitment Orchestrator’s proprietary recommendation engine transforms how organizations approach new commitment purchases:

• Recommendation engine: Our recommendation engine analyzes the usage patterns to suggest optimal commitment purchases that balance savings with flexibility.
• Guard Rails Against Over-Commitment: Unlike basic tools that might recommend maximum commitments regardless of risk, Commitment Orchestrator factors in changing usage patterns to prevent costly over-commitments.
• Strategic Term Selection: The engine recommends commitment terms tailored to your usage stability, potentially suggesting shorter terms than AWS’s default recommendations to maintain flexibility while maximizing savings.
• Forecasting Integration: Recommendations incorporate sophisticated forecasting that accounts for seasonality, growth trends, and planned infrastructure changes.
• Automated Savings Calculation: A dedicated savings computation engine continuously monitors and tracks all Reserved Instances managed by Harness, providing accurate ROI metrics.

2. Managing Existing Coverage

Commitment Orchestrator doesn’t stop at new purchases — it continuously optimizes your existing commitment portfolio:

• Utilization Optimization: The system identifies under-utilized Reserved Instances based on effective savings rates, not just simple utilization metrics.
• Strategic Reallocation: For under-utilized commitments, Commitment Orchestrator recommends optimal redistribution across your organization’s on-demand usage patterns.
• Exchange Intelligence: When exchanges make sense, the system navigates AWS’s constraints (such as ensuring new commitments equal or exceed the cost of exchanged ones) to recommend the most advantageous modifications.
• Continuous Feedback Loop: The optimization and recommendation engines work in tandem, each leveraging insights from the other to continuously refine the commitment strategy.

Key Benefits of Commitment Orchestrator

Organizations implementing Commitment Orchestrator typically experience multiple benefits:

• Increased Savings: Customers typically achieve 5–15% additional savings beyond what basic commitment tools deliver.
• Reduced Risk: Strategic term selection and utilization optimization minimize the risk of costly unused commitments.
• Time Savings: Automated orchestration eliminates hours of manual commitment management each month.
• Financial Accuracy: Improved visibility enables more accurate financial forecasting and budgeting.
• Cross-Team Alignment: Shared visibility and attribution foster collaboration between different departments of the organization.

Conclusion: Transforming Commitment Management

Cloud commitments represent one of the most significant opportunities for reducing cloud costs, yet many organizations struggle to manage them effectively. Harness Commitment Orchestrator transforms this challenge into an opportunity through unprecedented visibility and intelligent orchestration.

By combining deep commitment insights with automated optimization, Commitment Orchestrator enables organizations to maximize their cloud ROI without sacrificing operational flexibility or increasing management overhead.

As cloud costs continue to grow, effective commitment management isn’t just a cost-saving measure — it’s a competitive advantage. Commitment Orchestrator delivers that advantage through technology that makes complex commitment decisions simple, strategic, and impactful