vscode-infracost VS aws-cloudformation-coverage-roadmap

Hi, we are Ali, Hassan, and Alistair, co-founders of Infracost (https://www.infracost.io/). Infracost helps engineers see the cost of each Terraform change before launching resources. When changes are made, it posts a comment with the cloud cost impact. For example, “you’ve added 2 instances and volumes, and change an instance type from medium to large, your bill will increase by 25% next month, from $1000 to $1250 per month”.

We launched in February 2021 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26064588), and Infracost is now being actively used by over 3,000 companies. However, there is a shift happening in the cloud cost management space. New teams, called FinOps teams (a combination of "Finance" and "DevOps"), are being formed within companies to manage cloud costs.

One of the first tasks assigned to these teams is to determine "who is using what" - that is, which teams, business units, products, etc. are spending the most on cloud. To accomplish this, they use tags. Tags are labels that all cloud resources should have and are key-value pairs. For example, a server could be tagged with: product=HackerNews; environment=production; team=blueTeam. So if resources are not tagged properly, then you can’t tell who is using what.

However, FinOps teams face challenges because their tools are reactive. These tools begin by analyzing cloud bills and providing visibility of tags from there. This means that they are looking at resources that are already running in production and costing money. A customer recently shared, “I want all resources to be properly tagged. But if they are not, I would rather a resource not be tagged at all than be tagged incorrectly.”

My "aha" moment! FinOps teams can define a tagging policy that can be validated in CI/CD before resources are launched. This is important because if code is shipped with the wrong tags, FinOps teams will have to fight for sprint time to fix them. Even if you shut down an untagged resource directly in the cloud, the next time Terraform runs, the resource will launch again with no tag. You need to fix the issue at its root.

I’d love your feedback on our solution to the tagging problem. You define your tag key-value policy in our SaaS product, and Infracost checks all Terraform resources per change. If anything fails the policy, it posts a comment with the details of which resources need tags, and what the allowed values are. Once fixed, it will let the code be shipped to production.

Try it out by going to https://dashboard.infracost.io/, setting up with the GitHub app or GitLab app, and defining your tagging policy. It will then scan your repository and inform you of any missing tags and their file and line number. You can use the free trial, but if you need more time, please message me and I’ll extend it for you.

I would also love to hear how others ensure that the correct tag keys and values are applied to all resources, and whether this is done proactively or reactively. Additionally, I would be interested in hearing about any lessons learned in the process.

Cheers

Great toolchain, including Infracost or tfsec.

Infracost is an open-source tool for estimating the cost of cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code templates.

Throughout this post, you will see me mention the cost of running this using an estimate. I have been using for a while, a tool called infracost which is an open source (with subscription based additions) cost estimator tool - https://www.infracost.io/. For this demonstration, using the sample code listed above, it would cost an estimated $76.65/month - so if you don't want rack up a bill, only deploy when you want to test, and use Terraform to destroy the services when you are done.

Infracost : Infracost is an open-source tool that allows users to see the cost of running their infrastructure, such as AWS resources, in near real-time. It uses the AWS Price List API to determine the costs of resources, and can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines to provide cost feedback during the development process. This allows developers to make informed decisions about their infrastructure and optimize costs. Additionally, Infracost can be used to create alerts based on cost thresholds, so you can be notified when your infrastructure costs exceed a certain amount. This can be especially useful for teams that operate on a tight budget or need to manage costs closely.

An Infracost API key. You can get one by signing up for free at Infracost.io.

Since Wing compiles to Terraform, you should be able to manually run Infracost (https://www.infracost.io) to get an idea of costs.

Having that capability baked into the language/compiler would be a great addition.

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.