Detailed Feature Comparison

Harness Cloud Cost Management vs. Spot by NetApp

Summary:

Spot by NetApp 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 by NetApp 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 by NetApp does not provide this support. Instead of by logical groupings in the context of the business, it provides this visibility at a cluster or workload level.

For teams that want both automated cloud cost savings as well as rich multi-cloud and container cost visibility, savings, and forecasting, Harness 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. Our Cloud AutoStopping™, combined with Spot Orchestration, automates and creates cost savings opportunities that can’t be found through manual scheduling efforts.

Cost Visibility:

Understanding your cloud costs in the perspective that you do business is fundamental to taking control of and optimizing your cloud spend. With multi-cloud deployments built on scalable Kubernetes clusters on the rise, having a single view of all of your costs by department, workload, environment, or any aspect that fits your business needs ensures that your teams have the information they need to manage their cloud spend. 

Spot by NetApp falls short on providing costs in their users business contexts, instead providing only account/sub-account level granularity of cloud costs. They don’t provide unified views of multi-cloud costs, so your teams, applications, and workloads don’t have full visibility of their costs out of the box. 

Harness Cloud Cost Management excels at giving your teams the granular cost visibility they need to succeed. From Cost Perspectives that are customizable views of costs in your business context and Cost Categories which allow you to do dynamic bucketing of cloud costs across all your multi-cloud environments, to custom business intelligence dashboards which give you powerful insights into your cloud spend, Harness Cloud Cost Management gives your teams the information they need to take control of their cloud spend.

Idle Resource Management:

‍One of the biggest sources of cloud waste is idle cloud resources, especially in test/dev environments. Your engineering teams don’t work 24x7, so why would you want their cloud instances to? Shutting down idle cloud resources while they aren’t in use can deliver major cost savings, but infrastructure teams struggle to automate this to reduce friction with engineering productivity.

Spot by NetApp does provide schedule based instance shut down, but it’s little better than a manually maintained Lambda script. While this can save on cloud costs, it leaves a lot of cost savings on the table, especially for test resources that are not used consistently during working hours. Any deviations needed from the predetermined schedule need manual administrative attention to execute.

Harness Cloud Autostopping automatically detects and halts idle cloud resources when they aren’t in use, and brings them back up again once an application or engineer accesses them. Our customers configure the Cloud Autostopping policy once, and we do the rest, freeing up DevOps teams to focus on more value added activities than managing manual shut-down schedules.  Harness customers save up to 80% on the cloud costs with Cloud Autostopping.