Readit NewsThis seems to be solving a problem that most enterprise software engineers don't have. If you're at a large company that has already chosen its preferred cloud, you're probably already spending $xxM+ with them annually and you probably get CUDs & other incentives to keep your business growing with them.
That said, I've never personally seen any cloud project where there wasn't a business case review that didn't include a review of architectural plans/assumptions and expected cloud service consumption profiling. I think what's different here is that you can help engineers close a feedback loop that is often left open between when a project is planned & scoped and when 1) the landing zone (or data pipelines) is created, and 2) when the app/system is moved from test/QA into production. This could be helpful for the project/product manager, especially, because anything that looks out of whack with the forecast should be escalated promptly.
To a certain extent I agree - I've worked on projects where a resource amounts to a rounding error in the overall cloud bill; for many organizations, cost is an important NFR for a project.
Going off the other threads of this post, how much engineers should know or care about billing seems to be open for debate; I think an engineer needs to appreciate that often cost is one of the many trade-offs that need to be accounted for
I just installed to test this out and my cost isn't being calculated at all. I took a ekctl yml file and had chatGPT convert it to a terraform file; the terraform file validates; but nothing is discovered by Infracost plugin. I have it off my <project root>/deploy/terraform/. I wish there was some more feedback from the plugin why it cannot locate or visualize my cost.
I just gave this a try with https://github.com/eksctl-io/eksctl/blob/main/examples/01-si...
ChatGPT gave me a decent chuck of terraform and running Infracost against it gave me a $515 monthly cost.
If you go to the settings of the plugin and get the absolute path of infracost binary then run
infracost breakdown --path .
in the dir with the terraform, does it give you a breakdown?
This is nice but tackle it this ways might be unnecessarily complicated. I don't always need to look at the cost while writing code and it could fail to track, say, resources dynamically created with something like CDK.
More useful for me would be to plug directly into the account OR to analyse the cloud formation template, which can be easily obtained regardless of the IaC you're using.
The next step is certainly to look at the cloud account to get information on usage - this completes the picture of both for intended resources to create and what is already there.
Thanks for the feedback
I've been an early user of Infracost and I cannot recommend it enough. It being in the CI/CD system is good but it being in the IDE is excellent. Cost is an important architecture concern and yet it's one of the most opaque things to deal with. This IDE plugin for Infracost fixes cost being opaque.
Excellent work, thanks for this.
Great feedback - thanks
Do you have some testimonials from customers to show us how do they use it and what value do they get out of it?
In my org 50k-100k cloud bill I don't see that much use for it (mainly we are not increasing our costs significantly and we roughly know what we are paying for).
I can see a lot of value for indie/small/medium sized biz but the commercial of that is too high in my opinion.
Hey, thanks for the question - Infracost does three things at the moment: Cost estimation before code is merged (and this is what is in JetBrains now with this plugin); then it checks the code for best practices being followed (like if the code is using old instance types, or old volume types, or there is no retention policies in place etc), it will tell the engineers exactly how to fix those. and finally, it also checks to make sure all resources are tagged properly both with the key and value being checked. Again it tells the engineer how to fix it if there isn an issue.
So overall, the two main benefits are cost avoidance, and then engineering time saving or toil reduction, since all the issues get fixed before the code is merged. The product is being used by over 3,000 companies now in CI/CD; we have a few case studies on the website: https://www.infracost.io/safe-fleet/
Good idea mate. This is the kind of thing that should have heaps of users.
I wanted to watch the YouTube video but I didn’t have access to audio, and gave up. Video took to long and had too few visual cues - I think many people will do the same.
So you should make a super short gif (10-20 seconds max) that gets the point across extremely fast and visually - no audio.
Post it on Reddit on webdev, you’ll get a shit tonne of people installing this.
I’ve had lots of success with this simple method (sold a personal project with 700,000 users)
Thanks for the feedback - appreciate the comments on the video, I can see that without audio the first minute or so is a bit dull -
Hope this Gif is clearer - https://github.com/infracost/jetbrains-infracost/blob/244ee8...
I have more macro questions about this. Sometimes I find engineers aren’t best placed to evaluate cost at all. What might be perceived as expensive (say relative to a salary) is not expensive at all in the context of the business problem being solved.
Think there’s a book called “measure what matters” and the idea is what we measure shapes companies and behaviour. So I’d be very careful about implementing anything like this in my org.
You're right, there are multiple roles for FinOps in an organization from the engineer up to finance and engineering management.
This is tackling one aspect of this - highlighting the cost to the engineer.
It adds things like management of guardrails and policies that can be maintained by a finops role, or engineering manager. PRs can block or notify if thresholds are going to be breached by a specific PR.