infracost VS atlantis

‍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 🤗

None of these are a replacement of Terraform Cloud (recently rebranded to HCP Terraform). For example, when you create a PR, it could affect multiple workspaces. The new experimental version of TFC/TFE (I refuse to call it HCP!) implements Stacks, which is something like a workflow, and links one workspace output to other workspace inputs. None of the open-source solutions, including the paid Digger [0], support this - only the paid one, such as Spacelift [1] (which is the closest to TFC if you ask me). Having a monorepo of Terraform is a common design pattern, so, if I change an embedded module, it could trigger changes it many workspaces. As far as I know, Atlantis [2] can't really help in this case.

By the way, the reason I singled-out Spacelift is due to its quality, and the great Terraform provider it has. Scalr [3], for example, has a really low-quality Terraform provider. I extensively use the hashicorp/tfe provider to manage TFC itself.

[0]: https://digger.dev/

[1]: https://spacelift.io/

[2]: https://www.runatlantis.io/

[3]: https://www.scalr.com/

Atlantis is a pull request automation tool that works well with plain Terraform right away. But what if we're already using Terramate to generate Terraform code?

Atlantis automates reviewing and deploying Terraform via pull requests, streamlining collaboration and ensuring consistency across Terraform deployments.

For example, Atlantisgo for Terraform, Zapier’s Kubechecks for Argo CD, Quizlet’s GitHub action all do something similar to this. But a generic, extensible tool for IaC providers doesn’t seem to exist. Additionally, many of them require exposing your Kubernetes cluster or other infrastructure to third-party access, webhooks, etc.

Our first attempt was to introduce other engineering teams to Terraform - the Platform team was already using it extensively with Terragrunt, and using Atlantis to automate plan and apply operations in a Git flow to ensure infrastructure was consistent. We'd written modules, with documentation, and an engineer would simply need to raise a PR to use the module and provide the right values, and Atlantis (once the PR was approved by Platform) would go ahead and set it up for them.

Alternatively, you can look at solutions like Atlantis or spacelift.

Atlantis: https://www.runatlantis.io/

Looking at the commits at https://github.com/runatlantis/atlantis, it looks like 1.6.5. Am I right?

We use Atlantis [0] for CI/CD automation of Terraform pull requests to a centralized repository. It's pretty good too, especially for a self-hosted solution. I can't see how Terraform Cloud's costs would be justifiable for us without a custom contract.

[0] https://www.runatlantis.io/