Show HN: Infracost (YC W21) – open-source cloud cost policies

• infracost

  85 10,239 9.7 Go

  Cloud cost estimates for Terraform in pull requests💰📉 Shift FinOps Left!

  

Hi, we’re Ali, Hassan and Alistair, co-founders of Infracost ([https://www.infracost.io](https://www.infracost.io/)). Infracost shows engineers the cost of each Terraform change in CI/CD before resources are launched. When something changes, it posts a comment with the cloud cost impact. e.g. you’ve added 2 instances and volumes, and have changed an instance type from medium to large, this will increase your bill by 25% next month from $1000 to $1250 per month.

We launched the first version of Infracost just under a year ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26064588). As we said in our first release ‘the people who are purchasing cloud resources are not shown costs upfront, so they don’t know how much the resources will cost before launching them’. Our assumption was that because we are open source and the engineers are flying blind, they would pull us into the workflow. Actually, something different is happening:

The engineers are not pulling us in - it turns out to be the senior DevOps, SREs and platform teams. One of their challenges is figuring out how their small team of 7 people can fulfill the infrastructure requirements of hundreds of engineers. To solve this, they have created and put in place processes for engineers to provision infrastructure when they need. Now they want to implement cost policies and guardrails so that these hundreds of engineers don’t blow past all budgets. For example, if a change will result in a higher than 15% increase, leave a warning. If a change results in a >25% increase in costs, block the change till a team lead has reviewed it.

This has two implications for us. First, we need to create an output that isn’t only used by humans but is also digested into other systems to make further decisions. The second is the people we have been speaking to are not our end users. We need to figure out how we can get introduced to our end users, and create a different set of questions for each persona.

Now, we are reworking our JSON output and creating examples with standard policy tools like Open Policy Agent (OPA), HashiCorp Sentinel and Conftest. We’d really love your feedback around the cost policies use-case. You can check out the repo for GitHub Actions at (https://github.com/infracost/infracost) (our other CI/CD integrations are listed here: https://www.infracost.io/docs/#4-add-to-cicd).

We'd love to hear how you think about policies and guardrails.

• cloudquery

  102 5,581 10.0 Go

  The open source high performance ELT framework powered by Apache Arrow

  

So you've been speaking to the first group and need a way to speak to the second group, got it, thanks.

A couple of questions:

1. It seems your product is proactive with respect to cloud costs while Vantage, CloudForecast etc are more on the reactive side of the spectrum?

2. I imagine that relative to Infracost, a cloud asset management tool like CloudQuery https://github.com/cloudquery/cloudquery would also fit in the reactive bucket?

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• cloud-pricing-api

  7 349 0.0 TypeScript

  Discontinued GraphQL API for cloud pricing. Contains over 3M public prices from AWS, Azure and GCP. Self-updates prices via an automated weekly job.

  

The complexity is crazy for sure. Around 10 years ago I started looking at cloud costs as part of my PhD - back then there were around 10,000 price points that I was scraping manually, today there are more than 3 million prices between AWS, Azure and Google that we're fetching in https://github.com/infracost/cloud-pricing-api

• actions

  4 211 5.9 JavaScript

  GitHub Action for Infracost. See cloud cost estimates for Terraform in pull requests. 💰📉 Love your cloud bill! (by infracost)

  

We couldn't wait either so we talked with other TFE users who were using Infracost and we learned from them to make an example of how to run it with GitHub Actions: https://github.com/infracost/actions/tree/master/examples/te...

We have similar examples for GitLab (https://gitlab.com/infracost/infracost-gitlab-ci/-/tree/mast...) and Azure DevOps (https://github.com/infracost/infracost-azure-devops/tree/mas...).

Happy to help with any issues via infracost.io/community-chat

• infracost-gitlab-ci

  1 - -

We couldn't wait either so we talked with other TFE users who were using Infracost and we learned from them to make an example of how to run it with GitHub Actions: https://github.com/infracost/actions/tree/master/examples/te...

We have similar examples for GitLab (https://gitlab.com/infracost/infracost-gitlab-ci/-/tree/mast...) and Azure DevOps (https://github.com/infracost/infracost-azure-devops/tree/mas...).

Happy to help with any issues via infracost.io/community-chat

• infracost-azure-devops

  1 29 5.6 TypeScript

  Azure DevOps integration for Infracost. Shows cloud cost estimates for Terraform in pull requests for Azure DevOps repos and GitHub repos.

  

We couldn't wait either so we talked with other TFE users who were using Infracost and we learned from them to make an example of how to run it with GitHub Actions: https://github.com/infracost/actions/tree/master/examples/te...

We have similar examples for GitLab (https://gitlab.com/infracost/infracost-gitlab-ci/-/tree/mast...) and Azure DevOps (https://github.com/infracost/infracost-azure-devops/tree/mas...).

Happy to help with any issues via infracost.io/community-chat

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