Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This guide walks through practical ways to embed cost awareness directly into CI/CD workflows so development teams can make cost-informed decisions before deployment. You’ll learn how to implement automated cost feedback loops, introduce pipeline budget guardrails, and use Harness Cloud Cost Management to align DevOps velocity with FinOps accountability.

In Part 1, we argued that most dev teams start in the wrong place. They obsess over prompts, when the real problem is structural: agents are dropped into repositories that were never designed for them. The solution was to make the repository itself agent-native through a standardized instruction layer like AGENTS.md. But even after you fix the environment, something still breaks. The agent starts strong.

If you’re evaluating compliance controls against your Kosli trail data today, there’s a good chance you’ve written some glue code to make it work. A script that pulls trail data from the API. Another that downloads attestations one by one. Something that mangles the JSON together into a shape that your chosen compliance engine can evaluate. And then that engine itself, whether it’s OPA, a custom Python script, or something else, installed and configured in your pipeline.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has now set out its latest actions under the Digital Markets Competition Regime (DMCR), following its multi-year Cloud Services Market Investigation. While the regulator has now expanded its focus into business software ecosystems, we must not lose sight of the core issue: the entrenched dominance within the UK's cloud infrastructure.