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We don’t have strict rules around this but it would be easy to add some policy checking to block any change that is surprisingly expensive.
I ran the tool on one of my projects' terraform files and it came out with a huuuuge list of infrastructure along with summaries like "Monthly cost depends on usage: $0.026 per GiB". But the grand estinated total cost of this entire project was: $0 per month...
That's the tricky bit, you can't really estimate the cost of this stuff without doing napkin maths on usage. I don't really see how you'd be able to improve this situation, either.
I'm glad someone is trying to bring better transparency to cloud costs. I think this would be a cool thing to add in a terraform CI pipeline. For example: you could allow your devs to be more agile when prototyping by allowing them to change terraform in dev without approval, assuming the MR doesn't add more than $XYZ in costs per month.
Fun fact... HashiCorp actually got a patent around (part of) this https://patents.google.com/patent/US11347559B2/
Fun fact... HashiCorp actually got a patent around (part of) this https://patents.google.com/patent/US11347559B2/
Terraform cloud does have a cost estimation feature [1]. You might have to upgrade your plan to access it. [1] https://www.terraform.io/cloud-docs/cost-estimation
Been using this for what seems like a year now as part of our review process using Atlantis ( https://www.runatlantis.io ) and it has been a welcome addition to have a cost report for every change. We don’t have strict rules around this but it would be easy to add some policy checking to block any change that is surprisingly expensive.
This is cool, but if you extensively use cloud-native components where the bare metal is abstracted from you (eg: noSQL databases, pubsub, storage buckets, cloud functions, etc) it's very rare you're paying a fixed sum, compared to if you're doing stuff the old school way with a virtual machine assigned 2GB of RAM and 2 CPUs where it's more obvious that you're paying a fixed sum. I ran the tool on one of my projects'…
I have to assume they could model some projections based on your current usage, and give you that? Predicting the future is hard, of course, but if their algorithm is simple & basic enough to understand, it'd surely be quite helpful, no?
This is cool, but if you extensively use cloud-native components where the bare metal is abstracted from you (eg: noSQL databases, pubsub, storage buckets, cloud functions, etc) it's very rare you're paying a fixed sum, compared to if you're doing stuff the old school way with a virtual machine assigned 2GB of RAM and 2 CPUs where it's more obvious that you're paying a fixed sum. I ran the tool on one of my projects'…
But you're right that it needs usage data, or models of usage data... For now, the CLI can fetch usage data from the cloud APIs for S3/Lambda/Dynamo and show engineers that functionX was invoked 2M times in the last 30 days: https://www.infracost.io/docs/features/usage_based_resources...
Cool tech, though I am personally sad that this is even a problem that needs solving. The fact that there's no price transparency, seemingly by design, in cloud products is :(
Are you concerned that there's no price transparency or that pricing isn't predictable? If so, I guess I'm curious how you define price transparency, since pricing in the cloud isn't opaque in the same way it is in medicine.
Fun fact... HashiCorp actually got a patent around (part of) this https://patents.google.com/patent/US11347559B2/