vscode-infracost VS terraform

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.

Infracost

State Encryption was one of those long requested features[0] (I had it on my ideas list for years[1]) that Hashicorp didn't have much incentive to build. I don't think it has to with distancing opentofu as such, but the opentofu team prioritizing the right things that customers actually need.

[0]: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/9556

[1]: https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas#-mars-terraform-remote-htt...

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/34402

I’m not a lawyer and have no idea who is right or wrong but I understand why Hashicorp is scrutinizing this.

Just to give an example of the power of Go for CLI builds, you may have already used or at least heard of Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Terraform, but what do they all have in common? They all have a large part of their usability via CLI and are developed in Go 🐿.

Each app’s front end is built with Qwik and uses Tailwind for styling. The server-side is powered by Qwik City (Qwik’s official meta-framework) and runs on Node.js hosted on a shared Linode VPS. The apps also use PM2 for process management and Caddy as a reverse proxy and SSL provisioner. The data is stored in a PostgreSQL database that also runs on a shared Linode VPS. The apps interact with the database using Drizzle, an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) for JavaScript. The entire infrastructure for both apps is managed with Terraform using the Terraform Linode provider, which was new to me, but made provisioning and destroying infrastructure really fast and easy (once I learned how it all worked).

For example, integrating Terraform for infrastructure as code (IaC) into the IDP can streamline updates and rollbacks.

In this project, you will understand and get hands on experience around the entire concept around CI/CD from applications perspective. To fully gain real expertise around this idea, it is best to see it in action across different programming languages and from the platform perspective too. From the application perspective, we will be focusing on PHP here; there are more projects ahead that are based on Java, Node.js, .Net and Python. By the time you start working on Terraform, Docker and Kubernetes projects, you will get to see the platform perspective of CI/CD in action.

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.

To quickly deploy the architecture, we will be using Terraform. With Terraform, we can automate the deployment process and have our infrastructure up and running in minutes.