Cloud Cost Management Overview

Updated 2 months ago by Archana Singh

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 Cloud Cost Management (formerly Continuous Efficiency) is a solution that provides engineers and DevOps granular detail of their resource consumption hourly. Harness Cloud Cost Management (CCM) 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 Cloud Cost Management?

CCM provides insight and visibility into your cloud infrastructure costs. CCM 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' Cloud Cost Management?

The following illustration explains the different challenges that an engineering organization faces with cloud cost management and how Harness CCM can help you resolve them.

Some of the unique challenges that CCM 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. CCM can help you gain visibility into your costs. The following table lists the needs and pain points of different teams, and how CCM 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

CCM Coverage

The following section lists where you can use CCM:

  • Cloud Platforms
    • AWS
    • GCP
    • Azure
  • Container Orchestration
    • Kubernetes: EKS (AWS), GKE (GCP), AKS (Azure)
    • ECS Clusters
  • Harness SaaS
Harness Connected On-Prem and Harness Disconnected On-Prem are not supported.

Supported Kubernetes Management Platform

The following section lists the support for Kubernetes management platform for CCM:

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 CCM FAQs 

Here is the list of frequently asked questions for Harness CCM.

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

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