vscode-infracost VS aws-lambda-java-libs

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.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda is a serverless function-as-a-service (FaaS) platform that lets you deploy, run, and scale code in the cloud as self-contained functions without having to manually configure any infrastructure. Lambda runs your functions on demand in response to specific events, such as an HTTP request from the internet or activity in another AWS service.

FaaS is specifically focused on building and running applications as a set of independent functions or microservices. Major cloud providers like AWS (Lambda), Microsoft Azure (Functions), and Google Cloud (Cloud Functions) offer FaaS platforms that allow developers to write and deploy individual functions without managing the underlying infrastructure.

So AWS Lambda is basically a serverless computing service that is offered by AWS. It enables developers to run the code in response to various events. It protects the developers from the pain of managing the servers. Using a serverless execution model helps the developers to handle provision, manage and scale the servers automatically. Through this approach the developers can fully focus on writing the code instead of dealing with other aspects.

The first product that popularized the term “serverless” was AWS Lambda, which is both the prototypical and archetypical function as a service provider. It also has a great name, which pings back to its envisioned place in the cloud of the future. In computer programming, a lambda, often referred to as a lambda function or lambda expression, is a concise way to represent an anonymous function, which is a function without a name. The concept originates from lambda calculus in mathematical logic and has been adopted by many programming languages, each with its own syntax and characteristics.

You can build a custom config rules in 2 ways, using AWS Lambda and CloudFormation Guard. Lambda gives you a lot of flexibility, but it also brings complexity of maintaining. CloudFormation Guard is a bit more lightweight in that regard. Yes, you still need to maintain the logic to determine when your resource is compliant or not. But you need to do this in both cases, thus my go to preference is CloudFormation Guard.

AWS Lambda: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/

This blog details how you can use some key serverless components from AWS like Amazon Eventbridge, AWS Lambda, and Simple Notification Service to setup a system that will monitor your site (which can be running anywhere) and send emails, text messages, slack messages, and more when the reachability status of your site changes.

I use the OpenWeather API to receive the current temperature data by providing the latitude and longitude coordinates as query strings in the request. A Lambda function invokes the weather API and sends the current temperature value as a custom metric to CloudWatch. I then graph the temperature values on a dashboard and activate an alarm when the temperature sinks below zero degrees Celsius.

After two years, I moved to a Web3 startup where I was given a lead software engineer role. This new role gave me more hands-on experience with AWS, where I've learned to implement serverless technologies like Lambda and DynamoDB.