January 2021 Summaries

Cloud providers offer budget alerts to help users manage their spending, especially with usage-based resources that can incur significant costs. Beyond these alerts, companies are advised to identify significant cost changes to their infrastructure before deployment, such as estimating the cost impact of increasing RAM for a Lambda function. Infracost is an open-source tool designed for integration into CI/CD pipelines, providing comments on the cost implications of changes to infrastructure-as-code. It can flag significant cost changes, allowing users to set a threshold for when comments should be made, helping enterprises become more aware of cloud spending and potentially reducing cloud waste. Feedback and community engagement are encouraged through platforms such as GitHub, Slack, and Twitter.

A recent blog post discusses the integration of cloud cost estimates into DevOps workflows through pull requests, drawing an analogy to the "Prius Effect" where immediate feedback can lead to more efficient behavior. The challenge addressed is the difficulty for team leads and managers to monitor cost changes across multiple engineers or teams, as they cannot review every pull request. To tackle this, Infracost has introduced a new "infracost report" command that compiles cost data from multiple Infracost JSON files into a comprehensive table or HTML report, which can be shared with management via AWS S3. This solution aims to provide a clear overview of cost changes, and the author encourages feedback to improve the tool, inviting users to engage through various communication channels.

Over the past decade, enterprises have increasingly granted developers and DevOps teams direct access to cloud resources, leading to less predictable cloud expenses due to mismanagement and lack of cost awareness. The shift towards Infrastructure as Code and serverless architectures has compounded this issue, necessitating a solution beyond merely restricting access and analyzing bills post-factum. To address this, the creators of infracost.io have developed an open-source tool that estimates cloud costs for Terraform projects directly within the CLI, aiming to make developers more cost-conscious by providing upfront visibility. Drawing parallels to "The Prius Effect," where drivers adjusted their behavior based on real-time fuel consumption data, the tool is designed to encourage developers to consider cost implications as part of their workflow. By integrating Infracost into CI pipelines, cost changes can be peer-reviewed, potentially fostering a culture of cost efficiency among development teams. The founders are seeking to validate their theory that enhanced cost visibility can lead to improved cloud cost efficiency and are inviting feedback and shared experiences to gauge the tool's impact on development practices.