Harness Cloud Cost Management vs Google Cloud Billing

Detailed Feature Comparison

Harness Cloud Cost Management Vs. Google Cloud Billing

Cloud Support:

Google Cloud Billing only works on GCP. It lacks vital features that Harness Cloud Cost Management provides out of the box, including support for all major cloud providers and unparalleled support for Kubernetes. For this reason, even GCP users should consider Harness Cloud Cost Management over a vendor-specific solution. Features like Anomaly Detection, What If Analysis, and Root Cost Analysis are non-existent in Google Cloud Billing. We encourage you to explore our platform and see what you might miss out on.

Tag Management Required:

Google Cloud Billing employs a fairly robust “resource hierarchy” as they call it, with projects (required) that correlate to service-level resources, and labels (the equivalent of tags) that correlate to the ‘small’ stuff like applications, services, etc. In their words, labels are great for cost tracking at a granular level – so depending on how deeply you want to be able to allocate costs, labels might be a must, even though they are in theory “optional.” Basically, it can work without them, but you won’t get any good insight into what teams spent which resources. For granular visibility, it is important to create, apply, and maintain good tagging (labeling) policies. Harness can leverage existing tags, but minimizes the pain of tagging, providing visibility into application, service, environment, cluster, namespace, and workload with no tagging required.

Hybrid Cloud Visibility:

Google Cloud Billing provides insights into the GCP cloud only. Meanwhile, Harness provides coverage for Azure, AWS, and GCP as well. For any workloads running in Kubernetes, Harness provides visibility regardless of where the resources come from.

Visibility:

This granularity of visibility cannot be achieved in Google Cloud Billing without tags, or labels, as they call them. Without tagging, you’ll only have access to service-level data when it comes to costs. Additionally, what happens if you have application, microservice, or environment costs that are outside of GCP? Google Cloud Billing would not be able to provide insight, as it only works within GCP. This makes it unusable for multi-cloud environments. Harness, however, provides this visibility without requiring tagging – on all major cloud providers, including multi-cloud environments, and Kubernetes.

Cluster Visibility (Kubernetes/ECS):

Google Cloud Billing is only able to provide insights into GKE, the GCP managed service built specifically for Kubernetes. If you run your cloud workloads using Kubernetes as your tool of choice, Google Cloud Billing will not be the right tool for you. Harness truly shines in Kubernetes cost management and provides valuable visibility that other tools often fail to offer.

Root Cost Analysis (3 Metrics):

Google Cloud Billing provides no information whatsoever on idle, unallocated, and utilized costs within Kubernetes. Because these are crucial to understand resource efficiency in Kubernetes, Harness surfaces this information out of the box.

Cloud Event Correlation:

To correlate feature releases or engineering deployments with changes in cloud costs, a cloud cost management tool needs to have context behind an organization’s Continuous Delivery pipelines. Google Cloud Billing has no way of getting this context. Harness ties right into a customer’s pipelines to make the correlation between deployments and cost changes.

Cost Recommendations:

Harness focuses on providing cost optimization recommendations for Kubernetes workloads. This allows customers to simply use existing resources in more efficient ways – no need to validate purchase, downsizing, and rightsizing recommendations that change the composition of the infrastructure. Where Google Cloud Billing is different is that it does not provide these recommendations for Kubernetes. Instead, it will surface optimization opportunities for your resources for free, which, when paired with the capabilities Harness has for Kubernetes, actually can result in fully-optimized infrastructure.

Anomaly Detection:

Harness provides the ability for customers to automatically flag and drill down to any anomalous cost spikes, avoiding end-of-month surprises. Leveraging machine learning that customizes itself to a customer’s environment, including seasonality, customers are able to proactively detect and resolve cost spikes. Google Cloud Billing offers no comparative feature.

Key Takeaways:

Google Cloud Billing provides a good set of visibility, savings, and forecast tools for GCP. As a free tool available to GCP customers, it provides the basics that finance teams and budget owners want to know. However, they fall short in providing support for multi-cloud setups and container orchestration outside of GKE, which is where the world is headed. To fully leverage the capabilities of Google Cloud Billing and get a deep understanding of costs, there’s an inordinate amount of tagging required, and customers find themselves lacking support for day-to-day operations, as with services such as anomaly detection. Google Cloud Billing is built for point-in-time views into costs, not for the daily toil that goes into efficient cloud cost management.

If you’re looking for rich multi-cloud and container cost visibility, savings, and forecasting, Harness Cloud Cost Management is the clear winner. Harness understands the pressure good tag hygiene puts on engineering teams, and the requirement to paint a full picture of cloud costs that includes container costs. Harness is a less effort-intensive solution that gets customers more value out of the cloud.

*Please note: Our competitors, just like us, release updates to their products on a regular cadence. We keep these pages updated to the best of our ability, but there are bound to be discrepancies. For the most up-to-date information on competitor features, browsing the competitor’s new release pages and communities are your best bet.

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