Harness unveils new AI features for cloud cost optimisation

Harness has announced three new AI-powered features for its cloud cost optimisation and FinOps solution.

According to the company, these features, aimed at helping organisations across a range of industries manage increasing cloud costs, include Cloud Asset Governance, Commitment Orchestrator, and Cluster Orchestrator.

Harness says the Cloud Asset Governance feature employs policy-as-code to automate cost management, security, and compliance tasks across multi-cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

According to the company, this feature allows enterprises to create and enforce governance policies easily, eliminating cloud waste and ensuring adherence to security standards. The Harness AI Development Assistant (Aida) aids in creating custom rules with simple language prompts, validating those rules, and providing insights into existing rules, it says.

According to Harness, Commitment Orchestrator leverages machine learning to forecast compute spend and automates the purchase and management of AWS EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans. This feature aims to help enterprises maximise the value of their AWS EC2 compute spend by continuously optimising commitment utilisation, identifying opportunities for reallocation or exchanges, and ensuring comprehensive coverage of compute resources.

The third feature, Cluster Orchestrator, enables workload-driven intelligent node autoscaling for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Harness indicates that this feature allows organisations to manage their cluster infrastructure efficiently, achieving up to 90% cost savings on compute costs by running workloads on spot instances without compromising availability.

“As organisations increasingly rely on cloud services to power their digital transformation initiatives, managing and optimising cloud costs has become a top priority,” stated Ravi Yadalam, Director of Product Management at Harness.

“Mismanaged commitments, lack of governance, and failing to leverage heavily discounted excess cloud capacity can quickly lead to inflated cloud bills. Ultimately, this hinders innovation and growth," he said.

"To address these challenges head-on, we’re excited to launch three powerful new capabilities for our intelligent cloud cost optimisation and FinOps solution.”

Yadalam added, “Expanding on our current capabilities, this powerful new trio of features empowers organisations to master their cloud cost optimisation.

“Harness is at the forefront of this movement, providing enterprises with the tools they need to intelligently manage and optimise their cloud resources, commitments, and container environments to drive continued growth and success," he said.

The introduction of these features is set to provide organisations with enhanced tools to manage and optimise their cloud computing costs, thereby supporting their broader digital transformation goals and enabling continued growth and innovation.