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When we started, we thought everyone could use it from startups to medium sized companies. What we learnt is that the most value comes for the enterprises. The reason is they have used Terraform to decentralize the infra provisioning, so now instead of a central platform team making all the IaC changes, you have hundreds or thousands of engineers making changes every month.

Each of them are making a lot of decisions on the infra. and that combines with the crazy pricing models from the cloud providers was saving companies a lot of money.

Then, we saw how much time is saved when you catch it at this point vs after the fact. Basically avoiding a bunch of tech debt

Do you think that only applies to Carbon, or with Cloud Costs too?

I'll go one step further - Ali (my brother and founder), has a PhD in cloud cost modelling! 9 million live prices across AWS, Azure and GCP is pretty insane.

hahaha we could also track if you typed too fast! ... actually, this is an actual idea, if you use AI to generate the code ... hmmm; that would then be a fun project vs a cloud cost saving one

haha ahh I think it goes in waves in the US, but you got me - I grew up in Scotland, and recently moved to the US full time. So the EU mindset is still here :)

Lerc - they are in the UK, so some of them are offline, but I text their CEO :)

Check this out: https://greenpixie.com/gpx-data Thoughts?

Totally - something I've been thinking a lot about... I got pulled into these diets at one point in my life - I remember doing atkins, then went full vegan for a while, then went only meat lol

The diets were meh. But the cool thing was that I learnt so much about food in general! I honestly didn't know much about food growing up. I feel like I still don't know that much, but I know the basics, and i'm not afraid of digging into some of the details.

I appreciate the love. Yea, that was the cool thing during the research - if we reduce from a large to a medium, it both saves money and reduces carbon. Win - Win! Company can save money at the same time as reducing the environmental impact.

Yea, I actually saw something similar in the early days of Infracost, when we didn't track that many price points. The % change and the directionality was really helpful for engineers. Then we iterated on the prices, added more coverage etc, and the accuracy increased to a point where people trust the output of Infracost more than the AWS pricing calculator. That was a cool learning moment for me.

That's a great question - it is a hard thing to build for sure. We started talking to the CTO office of Google about it, and exactly as you say, it gets into the details. The folks at Greenpixie have been doing a lot of research on this, so when we spoke to a few of their big customers (Like Mastercard), they told us about the process they went through to evaluate the data, and trusted it from their ESG initiatives too.

Let me ask one of the Greenpixie folks to jump in here, maybe they can explain how they do it!

Hey! Thanks - I assume you mean the underlying data for the carbon? If so: https://greenpixie.com/gpx-data

Hi all, Hassan here - one of the founders of Infracost.

Infracost sits in Github / GitLab etc, and when an engineer makes a infrastructure code change, we show them how much the code will cost to run on cloud before they merge it. It also shows them how they can optimize their code for costs.

Cloud costs are very unfair in the way they are priced - we track prices from AWS, Azure and GCP, and from these three we track 4 million price points!! Why do we expect engineers will just know the cost of cloud resources? We need tools!

Would love your feedback, that's the only way we can keep building in the right direction. <3

This won't impact infracost, Alistair just responded to it: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/139538#issuec...

This is good - I just signed up and tried it out. I liked that I could take a picture and draw on the picture to highlight something to the team! It's like loom but for physical work environments like workshops!

hahaha love it - it'll keep evolving, and get more interesting for sure. I just think back to Dev and Ops, and how it went from a culture to a job title; testing was another one.

Hi, I think the key issue with both the Azure policy, and the Amazon services is that they only work after a pull request has been merged. Then the build fails, and the engineer has to come back to their code, make a new Pull Request and then send it again, till it passes.

That's the feedback we got from users, so with Infracost, the Pull Request itself tells the engineer what needs to be done, along with exact code line numbers etc before going any further, so everything is fixed within the same pull request. Also, it works across all cloud providers, so FinOps can set central tags in a uniform manner no matter where the engineers are launching resources.

Vantage is awesome - I've talked with Ben (their CEO) a few times. There are a lot of tools that start from the cloud bills, and give you visibility of everything (Vantage, Cloudability, Cloud Health Tech, Flexera etc) - all of these tools are reactive in nature as they start from the cloud bills. Infracost sits where your code sits, and therefore it can be proactive; before anything is launched and costs money, it'll tell you how much it is going to cost. So if you have a budget of $1K, and you try to launch a 24xl instance, it'll tell you that you budget will be blown, before you've launched the resource. Making it all proactive.

Bingo - so Infracost will tell you before you launch anything how much it'll cost. Now scale that to a few thousand developers across a large company, and it's very impactful.

Backfilling tags works, but the issue is if Terraform isn't updated, it causes drift - it's much better to fix it at the root, so that's what Infracost helps with

Yep, for sure! It's on the roadmap. We are friends with the folks at Pulumi too. Love what they are building, so hopefully we will get some bandwidth and add support. And Cloud Formation too. Azure ARM ... haha there is a lot more to build :)

Wonder how long until we get our first request to add support for this to infracost https://github.com/infracost/infracost? At least the price list looks a lot simpler than AWS / Azure / GCP - more like UpCloud! Though honestly, if it starts to work, I'm sure the number of prices/services will grow exponentially.

Thanks Jesse! I appreciate the love. Always around if there is anything me or the team can help with; questions, comments, issues, no matter how big or small :)

Thanks, I appreciate the love <3 We love OPA :)

Thank you! I wish I could add gifs in HN haha dancing around gif

It’s hard work to do the mappings between cloud pricing web pages and terraform resource params. It took us a week to do it just for S3, which has 50+ cost components. We have a community who are adding the mappings, we’ve developed guidelines and automated tests for them too. We now cover over 200 resources.

Since then, we have partnered with Hashicorp to build out their Run Tasks feature. It's still in beta, but more info about it here: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/terraform-cloud-run-tasks-bet...

1. Exactly! We built one of the early cloud cost management products before EC2 had cost explorer (it was called RightScale Cloud Analytics) and spent years working on the reactive approach. We're now bringing costs into the dev workflow, in the same way that security tools like Snyk have switched the focus to proactive.

2. Yep, those tools query the cloud APIs for existing resources. Meaning they have to have been launched (and already costing money) to be discovered.

Woohoo, thank you. The Spacelift integration is sweet and super easy to use. It's been great working with you and more to come :)

Thanks! There are two group of people: the integrators (DevOps/SRE/platform engs) who are pulling Infracost into the company workflows, and the engineers who are seeing the actual output of Infracost (the pull request cost comment). We'd love to hear from the engineers so we can also improve cost estimate output, and see how we can help the communication between the integrators and engineers (also finance later on).

Awesome! Let me know how it goes :) We also have CloudFormation in our target: https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/190

I like that, maybe we have to build up a knowledge base of wisdom (probably learnt through the hard way), and warn if the conditions are met or at least a list of the things to note. Then the cloud cost alert being a fallback safety net.

We've been thinking about this for a while, and if there is any way we can catch these types of cost spikes before they happen. We've managed to do it for Terraform resources using an estimation approach, and using a usage file, you can model expected usage-based resources (https://github.com/infracost/infracost/blob/master/infracost...), but this one has got us thinking more about policies.

To be clear - we would not have been able to catch this one right now :'(

Would love to hear thoughts / brainstorm ideas - is there any way we can proactively catch these types of cost spikes?