February 2023 Summaries

Infracost's new Guardrails feature allows users to set cloud cost guardrails directly within CI/CD processes, enabling proactive management of cloud expenses by alerting or blocking pull requests when cost estimates exceed predefined thresholds. Traditionally, cloud costs have been managed reactively, after expenditures occur, but Infracost changes this by providing pre-launch cost estimates to engineers and product managers. This approach supports the growing trend of decentralized infrastructure provisioning, where budgets are often not communicated to development teams, leading to overspending. With Guardrails, teams like product owners, Cloud Centers of Excellence, and FinOps can establish budget thresholds, and notifications are sent via various channels if these are exceeded, allowing for quick reviews and potential savings, such as a case where a company saved $9,000 a year by reducing unnecessary cloud resource usage. Additionally, the feature includes audit trails and options to block pull requests unless approved, offering transparency and control over cloud expenditures.

Infracost, an open-source tool, now offers a Jira integration that allows engineers to show the cloud cost impact of feature requests directly within the workflow before features are deployed to production. By integrating with Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) systems, Infracost provides cost estimates for infrastructure code changes, enabling teams to make informed decisions about whether to proceed with, modify, or budget for new features based on their cost implications. This proactive approach involves displaying cost estimates in Jira under relevant issues, allowing product managers and owners to understand the financial impact of requested features. The integration offers a bidirectional connection, facilitating visibility of cost estimates in both Jira and Infracost Cloud, thereby supporting more accurate budgeting and planning in the development process.

In 2023, Infracost enhanced its capabilities to help companies optimize cloud costs, particularly by integrating features into CI/CD workflows. These improvements include the introduction of Guardrails, which monitor pull requests and trigger actions when budget thresholds are exceeded, showcasing cost savings prevented from being added to cloud bills. Infracost also became faster by running only on changed directories, caching modules, and processing projects in parallel, significantly improving the speed of CI/CD builds. Enhanced support for Terragrunt, the introduction of single sign-on capabilities, and various bug fixes and improvements for cloud resources across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud further solidify Infracost's utility. A new YouTube demo illustrates how Infracost Cloud builds on the open-source tool to provide dashboards, guardrails, and centralized cost policies to help teams save money.