[HN Gopher] Show HN: Infracost (YC W21) - Open-source cloud cost...
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Show HN: Infracost (YC W21) - Open-source cloud cost policies
Hi, we're Ali, Hassan and Alistair, co-founders of Infracost
(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 engineers are flying blind, they (the
engineers) would pull us into their 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. We'd really love your feedback around
the cost policies use-case. We've created examples with standard
policy tools like Open Policy Agent (OPA), HashiCorp Sentinel and
Conftest. 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 for containing cloud costs!
Author : hkh
Score : 93 points
Date : 2022-01-26 15:39 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| deknos wrote:
| it's just sad, that the clouds make this so complicated. they
| could easily publish data per month how much something costs in a
| json or xml file format. but it seems to much to be of an
| advantage not to publish cloud costs.
| akh wrote:
| 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
| ricardbejarano wrote:
| I just came here to say that Infracost is an awesome tool that
| has great potential.
| hkh wrote:
| Thank you! I wish I could add gifs in HN haha _dancing around
| gif_
| jesse_cureton wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| Just wanted to chime in and give you folks some props, I've been
| using infracost for a few months as a one-man infra team for a
| small nonprofit I volunteer with. It was super easy to get set up
| in our CI pipelines in an afternoon, and it makes it much easier
| for the devs I work with to figure out what their cost impact is.
| A great product and a great team!
| hkh wrote:
| Thanks Jesse! I appreciate the love. Always around if there is
| anything me or the team can help with; questions, comments,
| issues, no matter how big or small :)
| andyroid wrote:
| Looks great! Love the OPA integration.
| hkh wrote:
| Thanks, I appreciate the love <3 We love OPA :)
| bovermyer wrote:
| This looks very cool. I'll definitely see if it works for us (we
| have a mix of Terraform and CloudFormation).
| hkh wrote:
| Awesome! Let me know how it goes :) We also have CloudFormation
| in our target:
| https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/190
| [deleted]
| nikolay wrote:
| Terraform Cloud has cost estimation built-in, but, in my
| experience, it's broken.
| hkh wrote:
| It's hard work to do the mappings between cloud pricing web
| pages and terraform resource params. It took us a week to do it
| just for S3, which has 50+ cost components. We have a community
| who are adding the mappings, we've developed guidelines and
| automated tests for them too. We now cover over 200 resources.
|
| Since then, we have partnered with Hashicorp to build out their
| Run Tasks feature. It's still in beta, but more info about it
| here: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/terraform-cloud-run-tasks-
| bet...
| throwaway24124 wrote:
| Hey team,
|
| Congrats on building something great. I've dealt with teams in
| the past that got very strict with cloud costs, and I wish I had
| a tool like infracost when I was on those teams. In fact, I
| started building an MVP for a very similar tool before I heard
| about infracost.
|
| How difficult was it to build your pricing pipeline in the
| beginning? When I was building my tool, just getting and
| organizing the cloud prices from the major cloud providers was
| the biggest hurdle that prevented me from moving forward. I can't
| imagine what it was like for your team to build the MVP. It's
| unbelievable how opaque these providers make a lot of their
| pricing.
|
| Thanks again for building such a useful tool!
| cube2222 wrote:
| Congrats on the Show HN!
|
| I can confirm Infracost is very easy to integrate with various
| automation as we've been able to implement it in Spacelift[0]
| using their CLI tool and even integrated[1] it into our OPA-based
| policy system.
|
| Great stuff, and makes this use case so much simpler to
| accomplish. (Imagine having to scrape cost data from various
| providers yourself, ugh.)
|
| Keep it up!
|
| [0]:https://spacelift.io
|
| [1]:https://docs.spacelift.io/vendors/terraform/infracost
| hkh wrote:
| Woohoo, thank you. The Spacelift integration is sweet and super
| easy to use. It's been great working with you and more to come
| :)
| ayewo wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| > _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._
|
| I'm not exactly clear on what you are trying to say in the quoted
| text. Perhaps it is because of how you've framed it? Both the
| senior and junior folks are end users, it's just their role aka
| personas that are different, no?
| hkh wrote:
| Thanks! There are two group of people: the integrators
| (DevOps/SRE/platform engs) who are pulling Infracost into the
| company workflows, and the engineers who are seeing the actual
| output of Infracost (the pull request cost comment). We'd love
| to hear from the engineers so we can also improve cost estimate
| output, and see how we can help the communication between the
| integrators and engineers (also finance later on).
| ayewo wrote:
| 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?
| toeknee123 wrote:
| Appreciate the shout out and your assessment is pretty spot
| on w/ #1 (I am one of the co-founders of CloudForecast).
|
| We're actually huge fans of Infracost and what they've done
| so far. They've built an amazing tool for eng teams, who
| should always be the lead when it comes to managing cloud
| cost. We actually have a few customers using them along
| side us as well.
|
| Congrats on launch, Ali, Hassan and Alistair!
| akh wrote:
| Thanks!
| hkh wrote:
| 1. Exactly! We built one of the early cloud cost management
| products before EC2 had cost explorer (it was called
| RightScale Cloud Analytics) and spent years working on the
| reactive approach. We're now bringing costs into the dev
| workflow, in the same way that security tools like Snyk
| have switched the focus to proactive.
|
| 2. Yep, those tools query the cloud APIs for existing
| resources. Meaning they have to have been launched (and
| already costing money) to be discovered.
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