aws-cloudformation-coverage-roadmap VS infracost

Given AWS CloudFormation is AWS's native language and service for infrastructure as code, you will likely find more official quickstarts provided by AWS in the language. In addition to this, AWS Support will probably be more capable of assisting you with issues when you need help. AWS Support is essential for large enterprises, particularly those new to the cloud or slow to adopt. These types of organizations may have a skill gap within their organization regarding their cloud skill set, and in turn, they are more likely to use AWS Enterprise Support.

Today, I will show you how to build Amazon Location Service, which allows you to build location-based applications within your AWS environment using AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) and AWS CloudFormation. I will also show examples of the recently popular CDK Migrate and AWS CloudFormation IaC generator.

AWS CloudFormation: Speed up cloud provisioning with infrastructure as code.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important part of any true hosting operation in the public cloud. Each of these platforms has their own IaC solution, e.g. AWS CloudFormation. But they also support popular open-source IaC tools like Pulumi or Terraform. A category of tools that also needs to be discussed is API gateways and other app-specific load balancers. There are applications for internal consumption, which can be called microservices if you have a lot of them. And often microservices use advanced networking options such as a service mesh instead of just the native private network offered by a VPC.

Cloudformation (IaC) does not need to be introduced to anyone, plus if you read the previous blogpost, the terraform provider (CC) we used is based on Cloudformation. Moreover, you will notice a lot of similarities, after all, we are implementing the same scenario, but with a different tool.

AWS Application Composer launched in the AWS Console at re:Invent one year ago, and this re:Invent it expanded to the VS Code IDE as part of the AWS Toolkit - but that’s not the only exciting part. When using App Composer in the IDE, users also get access to a generative AI partner that will help them write infrastructure as code (IaC) for all 1100+ AWS CloudFormation resources that Application Composer now supports.

CloudFormation

Of course, best practices today dictate that we should be deploying our infrastructure as code, using tools such as CloudFormation or Terraform.

If you're provisioning the above resources for the first time, you'll have to either configure Terraform to use specific AWS keys as you won't have OIDC connection yet. In my case, I chose to have those pre-requesites resources in a CloudFormation template and deploy them with StackSets.

‍Infracost is a cost estimation tool that generates cost estimates for Terraform projects, which is crucial for budget planning and cost optimization, especially in cloud environments where resource costs can vary significantly.

Infracost is a tool that provides cloud cost estimates for infrastructure managed by Terraform. It enables engineers to view and understand the financial impact of their infrastructure changes before they are applied. Infracost integrates directly into the workflow, offering cost breakdowns in various environments like the terminal, Visual Studio Code, or directly within pull requests. This feature allows for more informed decision-making regarding infrastructure modifications, promoting cost-awareness and budget management in the early stages of development. Infracost is particularly useful for teams looking to balance cloud resource utilization with budget constraints. Infracost Cloud is their SaaS product that builds on top of Infracost open source and works with CI/CD integrations. It gives team leads, managers and FinOps practitioners dashboards, guardrails, centralized cost policies and Jira integration so they can help guide the team (e.g. switch AWS GP2 volumes to GP3).

Inevitable end for every open source company since the free money ended. What bothers me is that wording is vague enough.

> HashiCorp considers a competitive offering to be a product or service provided to users or customers outside of your organization that has significant overlap with the capabilities of HashiCorp’s commercial products or services.

So, consider there is no cost estimate service and you built a thing that got popular (https://github.com/infracost/infracost). Then after 2 years Terraform Cloud catches up. What happens? Are you out of business?

I've started to work on Carbonifer, a tool that can estimate carbon emissions before deploying an infrastructure. A bit like infracost, this reads Terraform files and estimates carbon emissions if this plan is applied.

Infracost is an open-source project that helps us understand how and where we’re spending our money. It gives a detailed breakdown of actual infrastructure costs and calculates how changes impact them. Basically, Infracost is a git diff for billing.

Infracost: Estimativas de custos nos Pull Requests.

There is some discussion on the infracost issue tracker where it looks like this specific error is more common with tgenv

Cost:Infracost (estimation): https://github.com/infracost/infracostTerratag (tagging): https://github.com/env0/terratag (disclaimer, I am CEO at env0)

I use https://infracost.io 🤗