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Harness.io, a software delivery platform with cloud cost management capabilities, yesterday launched a variety of integrations that expand its services across Amazon GovCloud, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
The new integrations make it easier for engineers to weave cost considerations into engineering decisions when working across multiple cloud platforms. Harness has long offered basic capabilities across all three of the major cloud services, but it had the most advanced features on Amazon Web Services (AWS). On Azure, Harness has now added support for Azure native deployments and cloud bill analysis. On Google Cloud Platform, it has added critical integrations to bring the features closer to what was available on AWS.
Business functionality
Enterprises are starting to develop more scalable and resilient applications using containers and microservices on top of Kubernetes. All the major cloud platforms support Kubernetes, and in theory developers could write an application and deploy it to whichever cloud platform fits their requirements. In practice, however, engineers have to know the differences between the APIs and features of each platform and have the specific deployment for that tool.
“Developers shouldn’t need to know the APIs for every container deployment service now or in the future,” Harness senior product manager Rohan Gupta told VentureBeat. Harness allows them to focus on the business functionality, which can be deployed to the appropriate cloud vetted by security and engineering teams and prioritized by cost factors.
DevOps and finance teams have traditionally relied on different tools to deploy new apps and analyze cloud spending. Finance receives a bill at the end of the month and has to figure out where money is being spent and whose budget it should be charged back to.
Optimize costs
With Harness, finance and engineering teams can work together to find ways to optimize costs that address the constraints of business needs and technical infrastructure.
In general, billing systems provided by each cloud vendor only go to the granularity of the cloud service, and it’s up to each consumer to define and analyze the relationship between business and cloud service. In an ideal world, these relationships are automatically built, applied, and analyzed. When businesses use a combination of CI/CD and cloud cost management tools together, the business service to cloud service relationships can be automatically added as tags. This requires an impeccable tag hygiene to be sustained for any period, however.
“When it comes to cost management, a major challenge is understanding what business applications or services were responsible for costs that are rolled up at the cloud service level,” Gupta said.
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