by hkh on 1/26/22, 3:39 PM with 28 comments
We launched the first version of Infracost just under a year ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26064588). As we said in our first release ‘the people who are purchasing cloud resources are not shown costs upfront, so they don’t know how much the resources will cost before launching them’. Our assumption was that because we are open source and engineers are flying blind, they (the engineers) would pull us into their workflow. Actually, something different is happening:
The engineers are not pulling us in - it turns out to be the senior DevOps, SREs and platform teams. One of their challenges is figuring out how their small team of 7 people can fulfill the infrastructure requirements of hundreds of engineers. To solve this, they have created and put in place processes for engineers to provision infrastructure when they need. Now they want to implement cost policies and guardrails so that these hundreds of engineers don’t blow past all budgets. For example, if a change will result in a higher than 15% increase, leave a warning. If a change results in a >25% increase in costs, block the change till a team lead has reviewed it.
This has two implications for us. First, we need to create an output that isn’t only used by humans but is also digested into other systems to make further decisions. The second is the people we have been speaking to are not our end users. We need to figure out how we can get introduced to our end users, and create a different set of questions for each persona.
We’d really love your feedback around the cost policies use-case. We've created examples with standard policy tools like Open Policy Agent (OPA), HashiCorp Sentinel and Conftest. Check out the repo for GitHub Actions at https://github.com/infracost/infracost. Our other CI/CD integrations are listed here: https://www.infracost.io/docs/#4-add-to-cicd.
We'd love to hear how you think about policies and guardrails for containing cloud costs!
by jesse_cureton on 1/26/22, 6:09 PM
Just wanted to chime in and give you folks some props, I've been using infracost for a few months as a one-man infra team for a small nonprofit I volunteer with. It was super easy to get set up in our CI pipelines in an afternoon, and it makes it much easier for the devs I work with to figure out what their cost impact is. A great product and a great team!
by Abishek_Muthian on 1/27/22, 6:09 AM
I felt using Terraform PR to estimate costs via Github bot is very smart. I've added Infracost to my curated list of startup tools at StartupToolchain[1].
Tangentially, I would like to pick your brain on some related need-gaps if you don't mind;
1. Once during a conversation with GCP sales team(Initiated by them), I sent them a monthly AWS bill (~$ 1000) and asked them to revert back with equivalent services of GCP for each AWS service I'm using with their pricing. I never heard from them again. This seems like an obvious question for someone to migrate from one cloud infrastructure to another; Do you think there is a need for cost-estimate calculators for migrations which can take in my current bill and spit out estimated bill of another IaaS?
2. Are are there any cost-estimate calculators for calculating the cost for AWS after the free-12 months?[2]
[1] https://startuptoolchain.com/#cloud
[2] https://needgap.com/problems/277-what-will-be-my-aws-bill-af...
by ayewo on 1/26/22, 4:50 PM
> The second is the people we have been speaking to are not our end users. We need to figure out how we can get introduced to our end users, and create a different set of questions for each persona.
I'm not exactly clear on what you are trying to say in the quoted text. Perhaps it is because of how you've framed it? Both the senior and junior folks are end users, it's just their role aka personas that are different, no?
by throwaway24124 on 1/26/22, 10:50 PM
Congrats on building something great. I've dealt with teams in the past that got very strict with cloud costs, and I wish I had a tool like infracost when I was on those teams. In fact, I started building an MVP for a very similar tool before I heard about infracost.
How difficult was it to build your pricing pipeline in the beginning? When I was building my tool, just getting and organizing the cloud prices from the major cloud providers was the biggest hurdle that prevented me from moving forward. I can't imagine what it was like for your team to build the MVP. It's unbelievable how opaque these providers make a lot of their pricing.
Thanks again for building such a useful tool!
by deknos on 1/26/22, 9:18 PM
by ricardbejarano on 1/26/22, 5:09 PM
by cube2222 on 1/26/22, 4:48 PM
I can confirm Infracost is very easy to integrate with various automation as we’ve been able to implement it in Spacelift[0] using their CLI tool and even integrated[1] it into our OPA-based policy system.
Great stuff, and makes this use case so much simpler to accomplish. (Imagine having to scrape cost data from various providers yourself, ugh.)
Keep it up!
by bovermyer on 1/26/22, 4:42 PM
by gmh58 on 1/28/22, 12:53 PM
by nikolay on 1/26/22, 5:33 PM
by andyroid on 1/26/22, 5:57 PM