September 2021 Summaries

Infracost, launched in late 2020 as an open-source project by Hassan, Ali, and Alistair, has successfully raised $2.2 million in seed funding from prominent investors such as Sequoia, Y Combinator, SV Angel, and angel investor Yun-Fang Juan. The platform addresses a significant gap in cloud cost transparency for DevOps and SRE teams by providing real-time cost visibility within their workflows, enabling them to understand the financial impact of cloud resources before production deployment. With over 4,000 GitHub stars and a thriving community, Infracost tracks over 3 million price points from major cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, and is compatible with popular CI/CD systems and Terraform, with plans to support more Infrastructure as Code tools. The team continues to tackle complex challenges such as supporting diverse cloud resources, accommodating custom pricing for large enterprises, and estimating usage-based costs, with the help and direction from their active open-source community.

Infracost v0.9.7 introduces several updates, including a currency conversion feature that allows users to set their preferred currency using the `infracost configure set currency` command, with conversions occurring from USD based on current exchange rates. The update enhances Terragrunt support by automatically detecting Terragrunt projects and removing the need for manual configuration steps. Additionally, the release includes Slack integration for CI/CD workflows, enabling pull request comments to be posted to Slack channels, and adds support for new Azure Terraform resources. The community around Infracost is growing, with over 4,000 GitHub stars and more than 200 members on Slack, where discussions and feedback are encouraged. The team is also expanding, with new hires and ongoing projects, such as prototyping the use of AWS CloudWatch data to populate usage files for specific AWS resources. Community engagement is emphasized, with users invited to provide feedback and suggestions for further improvements.