Continuous Efficiency Overview
Current cloud cost management tools only provide insights into costs at the project, service, instance type, or tag. This limited insight is insufficient for development and DevOps teams looking to view and forecast the costs of their Harness deployments and active clusters' resources (namespaces, nodes, pods, and so on).
Furthermore, typical cost management tools are designed to provide monthly billing for CFO/CIO/CTO audiences. But for the engineers and DevOps teams consuming resources, there's no access or ability to analyze their costs quickly.
Harness Continuous Efficiency (CE) is a Harness cloud cost management solution that provides engineers and DevOps granular detail of their resource consumption hourly. CE is designed to bring cloud cost analysis and management into the hands of the engineers consuming cloud resources.

In this topic:
- Visual Summary
- What is Continuous Efficiency?
- Why Harness' Continuous Efficiency?
- Why is this Important?
- CE Coverage
- Supported Kubernetes Management Platform
- Harness CE FAQs
- Next Steps
Visual Summary
What is Continuous Efficiency?
CE provides insight and visibility into your cloud infrastructure costs. CE provides the following benefits:
- Cost Visibility: Insights into the costs of your Harness Applications and clusters. Provides granular cost details of your cluster namespaces, workloads, label, nodes, pods, and labels.
- Cost Optimization: Details of total cost vs. utilized, idle, and unallocated cost. Forecasts future spend based on historical data.
- Cost Governance: Enables you to set a budget and configure notifications based on thresholds.

Why Harness' Continuous Efficiency?
The following illustration explains the different challenges that an engineering organization faces with cloud cost management and how Harness CE can help you resolve them.
Some of the unique challenges that CE addresses are:
- Lack of visibility into the cost of their Application or clusters
- Unable to detect and resolve cost spikes
- Percentage of cloud spend wasted

Why is this Important?
Teams lack visibility into the cost drivers. CE can help you gain visibility into your costs. The following table lists the needs and pain points of different teams, and how CE resolves these issues and provides opportunities for improvement:
Engineer | DevOps | CTO/CIO | CFO | |
Need Context and Visibility | Applications Microservices Clusters/Nodes | Applications Environment Clusters Nodes Namespaces Workloads Labels | Cloud Provider Applications Teams | Cloud Provider Cloud Account Cost per Customer |
Pain Points | Lack of context or visibility Reactive troubleshooting | Lack of context or visibility Tagging cloud resource Reactive troubleshooting | Increasing cloud spend | Increasing cloud spend |
Why Harness? | Complete visibility Root cost analysis Cost optimization opportunities Identify cost triggers, for example, CPU and memory spikes Manage multiple clouds | Complete visibility Embed cost into pipeline No Tagging Manage multiple clouds efficiently | Shift cloud cost management to Dev teams | Shift cloud cost management to Dev teams |
CE Coverage
The following section lists where you can use CE:
- Cloud Platforms
- AWS
- GCP
- Container Orchestration
- Kubernetes: EKS (AWS), GKE (GCP), AKS (Azure)
- ECS Clusters
- Harness SaaS
Supported Kubernetes Management Platform
The following section lists the support for Kubernetes management platform for CE:
Technology | Supported Platform | Pricing |
OpenShift 3.11 | GCP | GCP |
OpenShift 4.3 | AWS On-Prem | AWS Custom-rate* |
Rancher | AWS | Custom-rate** |
Kops (Kubernetes operations) | AWS | AWS |
*Cost data is supported for On-Prem OpenShift 4.3. This uses a custom rate.
**Cost data is supported for K8s workloads on AWS managed by Rancher, but the cost falls back to custom rate.
Blog Post
The following blog post walks you through Optimizing Kubernetes Cluster Costs:
Optimizing Kubernetes Cluster Costs
Harness CE FAQs
Here is the list of frequently asked questions for Harness CE.
Cost is my CFO’s problem.
If your CFO is managing your cost, you’re being reactive to cloud changes. Your team can be proactive and mitigate any cost spikes.
My cloud platform already gives me visibility into the cost.
Cloud platforms don’t let you see the cost at a granular level, for example, application, clusters, nodes, workloads, namespaces.
I have already tagged everything, why would I need Continuous Efficiency?
You will have to re-tag everything if you:
- Create a new application
- Deploy a new microservice
- Or your company, team, or project is re-organized
After I reduce my costs, I won’t need Continuous Efficiency.
Reducing cost isn’t a one-time event. Engineering and finance need constant feedback to innovate and change. Hence “Continuous Efficiency”.
After we’ve identified our costs, will Continuous Efficiency help us reduce them?
Budgeting and alert thresholds are built into CE, with more features on the way.
Can your tool create custom reports and alerts?
Yes. CE provides alerts, reports, and forecasts you can fine-tune.
I know my cloud platform is accurate, how do I know your tool is accurate?
CE uses the same cost and usage report as your cloud platform.
Next Steps
- Enable CE for Kubernetes Clusters With an Existing Delegate
- Enable CE for Kubernetes Clusters By Adding a Delegate
- Enable Continuous Efficiency for Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Enable Continuous Efficiency for Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- Cost Explorer Walkthrough
- Analyze Cost Across Clusters
- Analyze Cost for AWS
- Analyze Cost for GCP
- Perform Root Cost Analysis
- Perspectives
- Optimize Kubernetes Cluster Costs With Resource Recommendations
- Create a Budget
- Manage CE Communication Strategy
- Use Cost Explorer APIs
- Continuous Efficiency FAQs