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Show HN: Infracost (YC W21): Be proactive with your cloud costs

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Re: Show HN: Infracost (YC W21): Be proactive with your cloud costs

#21

Post by akh »

keepamovin wrote: post #14
akh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great point - indeed FinOps teams consistently rank "empowering engineers to take action" as their number 1 challenge ( https://data.finops.org ) - and by that they mean the human and organization dynamics of the culture change they want to create across the org. The testing analogy is a good one as this feature also shows the engineers the current "failing policies" on the main branch too, so whilst they could merge…

Nice! What did you start out doing, if you don't mind me asking? And how did you come to this, pivot, if that's what it is?

We started out with the Infracost CLI showing engineers cost estimates in the terminal before they deployed their code. The learning was that it also makes sense to check for other things like tagging policy issues and best practices not being followed as these things are more actionable than showing engineers a cost estimate. The cost estimate is actually more useful to trigger notifications on, e.g. if an engineer is adding $10K worth of databases, let the engineering management or FinOps teams know so they're not surprised by the spike in the bill and can adjust budgets if needed.

Re: Show HN: Infracost (YC W21): Be proactive with your cloud costs

#22

Post by l-a »

So as a developer advocate and a tinkerer with a little home lab, I am often setting up and tearing down infrastructure to test things out. I use AWS because that's what I am most familiar and I try to be super careful about not running up a crazy bill, but I am still occasionally caught off guard. Now I am thinking about testing out Infracost to help prevent unwanted and unintentional spending.

As far as a solution to consistent tagging -- if I am understanding the problem space correctly -- something like Cloud Custodian could possibly help. It's open source and you can set up auto-tagging policies as well as use Cloud Custodian to backfill tags. These policies use lambda functions to respond to certain actions (ie, spinning up an ec2 instance, etc) and auto-tag with the resource creator/owner.

Re: Show HN: Infracost (YC W21): Be proactive with your cloud costs

#23

Post by hkh »

l-a wrote: post #22

So as a developer advocate and a tinkerer with a little home lab, I am often setting up and tearing down infrastructure to test things out. I use AWS because that's what I am most familiar and I try to be super careful about not running up a crazy bill, but I am still occasionally caught off guard. Now I am thinking about testing out Infracost to help prevent unwanted and unintentional spending. As far as a solution…

Bingo - so Infracost will tell you before you launch anything how much it'll cost. Now scale that to a few thousand developers across a large company, and it's very impactful.

Backfilling tags works, but the issue is if Terraform isn't updated, it causes drift - it's much better to fix it at the root, so that's what Infracost helps with

Re: Show HN: Infracost (YC W21): Be proactive with your cloud costs

#24

Post by toshk »

I love how we just build complexity upon complexity. A tool for all the problems that this new tool gave that was solving all these other tools. A never ending mountain of complexity. In that sense coding (and hosting) is like the law. The entire ecosystem will just keep expanding in complexity decade by decade

Re: Show HN: Infracost (YC W21): Be proactive with your cloud costs

#25

Post by frellus »

Would like to know more about how Infracost does dynamic cost estimation, for example if I allocate an S3 bucket I have no idea how much it'll grow to so what does it show? Or What ab out EC2 w/ batch, or Lamba? Does it force the developer to estimate the usage pattern, or...?

Re: Show HN: Infracost (YC W21): Be proactive with your cloud costs

#26

Post by cbcoutinho »

frellus wrote: post #25

Would like to know more about how Infracost does dynamic cost estimation, for example if I allocate an S3 bucket I have no idea how much it'll grow to so what does it show? Or What ab out EC2 w/ batch, or Lamba? Does it force the developer to estimate the usage pattern, or...?

Yes, usage metrics are set via a configuration file, which you can also check into git. Changes to resources as well as usage estimates contribute to the forecasted costs

Re: Show HN: Infracost (YC W21): Be proactive with your cloud costs

#27

Post by nine_zeros »

toshk wrote: post #24

I love how we just build complexity upon complexity. A tool for all the problems that this new tool gave that was solving all these other tools. A never ending mountain of complexity. In that sense coding (and hosting) is like the law. The entire ecosystem will just keep expanding in complexity decade by decade

How else will people make money (if they are a startup) or get promotions (if they are in a corporate).

Re: Show HN: Infracost (YC W21): Be proactive with your cloud costs

#29

Post by hkh »

GrandPoobahLOL wrote: post #28

oh, this is interesting, we're currently using Vantage ( https://vantage.sh ) how would you say infracost compares?

Vantage is awesome - I've talked with Ben (their CEO) a few times. There are a lot of tools that start from the cloud bills, and give you visibility of everything (Vantage, Cloudability, Cloud Health Tech, Flexera etc) - all of these tools are reactive in nature as they start from the cloud bills. Infracost sits where your code sits, and therefore it can be proactive; before anything is launched and costs money, it'll tell you how much it is going to cost. So if you have a budget of $1K, and you try to launch a 24xl instance, it'll tell you that you budget will be blown, before you've launched the resource. Making it all proactive.

Re: Show HN: Infracost (YC W21): Be proactive with your cloud costs

#30

Post by haxiel »

Hi, Azure admin here. The Azure Policy service includes a set of built-in policies to handle tags. There's one policy that requires new resource groups to be created with specific tags. Another policy allows resources within the resource group to inherit the same tags. I think this combination of policies would solve the tagging problem quite neatly, though I haven't tested it myself.
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