Detailed Feature Comparison

Harness Cloud Cost Management Vs. Spot.io

Tag Management Required:

Spot inherently provides a different frame of reference through which to view cloud costs, and that’s in the context of savings opportunities. Even with optimal tagging, Spot doesn’t provide the same level of cloud cost visibility that other tools in the space provide. If cost visibility is a core use case for you, Spot may not be the best option, though it does offer support for the use case.

Visibility:

Spot requires good tagging to provide visibility into applications, making the value of the tool dependent on customers’ ability to create, apply, and maintain good tagging policies. We are additionally unsure of how much filtering or visibility support Spot provides for custom tags or labels. Harness provides this visibility without requiring tagging, and additionally supports cost visibility by any tags assigned to resources by engineering teams.

Cluster Visibility (Kubernetes/ECS):

Spot provides a decent view of Kubernetes costs, whether in EKS, GKE, AKS, or other Kubernetes orchestrators. But, it lacks filtering and grouping options. The context of these costs is also centered around how much money can be saved, thereby missing an important step in a holistic approach into cloud cost management, which is assigning business context to cloud resource usage. Harness truly shines in Kubernetes cost management and provides valuable visibility that other tools often fail to offer.

Root Cost Analysis (3 Metrics):

Spot provides insights into utilized costs, allowing for rightsizing, but it does not directly provide insight into unallocated costs or idle costs. Idle costs can be inferred from rightsizing, but that puts the onus on the end user. Harness Cloud Cost Management provides granular views of all three out of the box, as these are crucial to understanding resource efficiency in Kubernetes.

Key Takeaways:

Spot approached the cloud cost management space from the angle of active cloud management, meaning they honed in on the savings component of cloud cost management, while providing less support for visibility and forecasting use cases. While Spot has evolved and expanded to include support for more “classic” cloud cost management use cases, they do so in the context of cost savings, which may not make sense as an immediate use case for all teams in the cloud. Many teams in the cloud want to see costs in the context of their applications, microservices, environments, or by higher-level groupings such as team or business unit, and Spot does not provide this support. It provides this visibility at a cluster or workload level instead of by logical groupings in the context of the business.

And while Spot is a great tool to automate cost savings across cloud workloads, the question of automation is the one to be answered – how critical is it for you to maintain control over your own cloud resource provisioning decisions? For teams that want granular insight into their cloud and container costs and seek to find ways to validate and make their own decisions, Spot may miss the mark by overshooting this crucial first step of cloud cost management and going straight to creating savings.

Harness Cloud Cost Management is for teams that want to assign business context to their understanding and management of their cloud costs, not just engineering context. While it was built with engineers in mind, finance teams and any other stakeholders can easily understand costs at a quick glance. 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 on engineering and financial management teams, and the requirement to paint a full picture of cloud costs that includes container costs. Harness is a low-effort 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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