opencost VS infracost

OpenCost is an open source implementation for Kubernetes cost monitoring and now cloud cost monitoring for AWS, Azure, and GCP. The project makes all of this data accessible via an API and user interface. While discussing the idea of running OpenCost on platforms besides Kubernetes we realized that with this new Cloud Costs feature there are users who want API access to their cloud billing data without needing to run on Kubernetes. I opened the Issue OpenCost without Kubernetes #2268 and as luck would have it, we had our internal Hackathon last week.

If you're not familiar with OpenCost, it's the open source CNCF project for monitoring Kubernetes and cloud spending. It's a Golang implementation of the OpenCost Specification for monitoring Kubernetes cloud costs. It has an optional web UI and you can also run it as a Prometheus metrics exporter. The code is all at https://github.com/opencost/opencost and you can learn more about the project at https://opencost.io

Original from source

OpenCost is an open source Cloud Native Computing Foundation project that provides monitoring for Kubernetes' cloud costs. We support AWS, Azure, GCP, and a few others. Always happy to help you get started, head to opencost.io and join us in #opencost on the CNCF Slack.

Here's the spec in case interested: https://github.com/kubecost/opencost/tree/develop/spec

‍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 🤗