May 2021 Summaries

In a conversation with David Julia, Head of Engineering at Eagle.io, the discussion centered around the significance of cost attribution in their environmental IoT platform, which is used for various applications such as water and natural resource monitoring. Eagle.io operates as a multi-tenant SaaS platform mainly on AWS, providing a higher-level solution compared to basic IoT services from providers like AWS IoT Core or Azure IoT. The company helps users quickly analyze and alert on data without dealing with complex configurations. Cost attribution is crucial for understanding the financial impact of adding new customers and ensuring the platform's pricing model is sustainable and profitable. This need became evident when negotiating with an enterprise customer who planned to drastically increase their platform usage, prompting Eagle.io to reassess their pricing and cost structures to maintain a healthy gross margin.

Infracost's achievement of reaching 3,000 GitHub stars serves as a testament to the significance and impact of GitHub stars in the open-source community. GitHub users often star repositories for bookmarking purposes or to show appreciation and support, acting as a crucial social signal that can motivate project creators and attract users and contributors. While stars help create confidence and a good first impression, they are not the sole indicators of a project's success; factors like activity level and documentation quality also play critical roles. GitHub stars can open doors to potential investors, as demonstrated by Infracost receiving interest from venture capitalists who monitor star counts for investment opportunities. The future of GitHub stars may parallel social media trends, where GitHub influencers could shape enterprise software marketing, potentially integrating features like demos and ads within the platform to promote open-source projects.

Infracost has reached significant milestones, now supporting over 100 AWS and Google resources and surpassing 100 members in its community Slack channel. The latest version, v0.8.6, introduces several enhancements, including support for AWS EC2 Reserved Instances, enabling users to perform what-if analyses and estimate monthly costs by defining instance parameters. A new integration with Jenkins allows users to view cost differences and set build failure thresholds based on cost estimates, adding a financial safety layer to CI/CD pipelines. Users can customize the output of cost breakdowns with the new --fields flag to tailor the display of cost data, and the usage file now supports array wildcards, simplifying configurations for resource arrays. Additionally, Infracost has added support for new cloud resources such as AWS Redshift and improved CPU-credit usage parameters for T2, T3, and T4 instances, enhancing its capabilities for cost estimation and tracking.