[HN Gopher] Show HN: Infracost (YC W21): Cloud Costs for Terrafo...
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Show HN: Infracost (YC W21): Cloud Costs for Terraform in VSCode
Hey, Hugo from Infracost (https://www.infracost.io) here. Infracost
shows engineers the cost of each Terraform change in CI/CD before
launching resources. When something changes, it posts a comment
with the cloud cost impact. e.g. you've added two 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. Over the last few months, I've been working on a native
evaluation for Terraform. Previously we relied on the Terraform CLI
to fetch cloud resource information, which was a little slow and
cumbersome. Native parsing is not only lightning-fast, but it
means we have contextual file information, which allows us to try a
load of cool new things. For example, we could provide real-time
suggestions to optimise your cloud costs as you write your
infrastructure code! This VSCode extension is the result of a few
weeks of hacking away whilst I should have been relaxing in the sun
in Italy... time better spent, I think! We're excited about the
possibilities of directly integrating with editors. There is so
much we can do to make DevOps lives easier when optimising cloud
spend. Right now, we're looking for your feedback on this initial
version of the extension. It currently ships with: 1. Show a
snapshot of the total cost of resources right above their Terraform
definitions. Updated on file save. 2. Resource and module blocks
support showing cost estimates, including 3rd party module blocks.
3. A cost overview web-view shows a detailed breakdown of what
components affect the price. Please note this is an early release
of the VSCode extension, so there will likely be bugs. If you get
stuck, please raise an issue (https://github.com/infracost/vscode-
infracost/issues), and we'll help you out asap. We'd love to get
your feedback on this extension, mainly what you think it's missing
and would help your workflow. Head over to the GitHub repo
(https://github.com/infracost/vscode-infracost) for more
information and installation instructions.
Author : hugorut
Score : 70 points
Date : 2022-06-29 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
| cube2222 wrote:
| Congrats on the release!
|
| One question, do you support, or maybe are planning to support
| usage-based pricing? Stuff like Lambda invocations.
|
| It's a common use-case and I think it's a tough nut to crack with
| your architecture, so wondering if you came up with something for
| that.
| akh wrote:
| Great question! See
| https://www.infracost.io/docs/features/usage_based_resources...
| as the CLI can pull usage data for Lambda/S3/Dynamo from the
| AWS APIs (e.g. CloudWatch).
|
| The other data source we can tap into is the actual billing
| data, e.g. AWS Cloud and Usage Reports - if you have any
| thoughts/preferences, checkout
| https://github.com/infracost/infracost/discussions/985#discu...
| leetrout wrote:
| Fun fact... HashiCorp actually got a patent around (part of) this
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US11347559B2/
| debarshri wrote:
| 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
| akh wrote:
| In case you're wondering:
| https://www.infracost.io/docs/faq/#whats-the-difference-
| betw...
| gregwebs wrote:
| Do you have plans to support Cloudformation (and cdk)?
| hugorut wrote:
| We actually have limited Cloudformation support in the
| Infracost CLI at this very moment in time. That being said we
| haven't been actively expanding support for it. We're a small
| team, and our core focus is on Terraform users and making their
| experience top-notch. However, we have a very lively community
| and always welcome contributions. Community members are
| building the Pulumi integration at the moment.
| [deleted]
| rco8786 wrote:
| 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 :(
| akh wrote:
| When I started looking at cloud pricing in 2009 there were ~10K
| price points, today there are more than 3M. The cloud vendors
| focus on moving fast and continually release new services but
| there is more they could be doing to make it easy for engineers
| to understand the costs. Infra-as-code added another layer of
| complexity as now engineers have no idea what we're about to
| buy on AWS when we run "terraform apply" or similar checkout
| commands in other tools. All software has a cost, it's just not
| visible until it's too late - that's what we want to change.
| mikkergp wrote:
| 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.
| rco8786 wrote:
| A little of both I guess.
| gneray wrote:
| Congrats on this. Love to see what you're doing here!
| hugorut wrote:
| Thanks!
| amarraja wrote:
| I skim most Show HN posts and think "that's cool", but never look
| at it again.
|
| Seeing this, I thought that's cool and it's something I really
| want to start using! Thanks!
| hugorut wrote:
| Oooh, that's really nice to hear! Thank you!
| lazzurs wrote:
| 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.
| akh wrote:
| Awesome! it's always fun hearing how users use Infracost in
| their workflow
| timcavel wrote:
| gwen-shapira wrote:
| Any plans to also support Pulumi?
| hugorut wrote:
| Great question, and it's something we get asked a lot. We have
| an open PR on our main CLI repo to add Pulumi support
| (https://github.com/infracost/infracost/pull/1752). This still
| has some way to go and is currently just using a Pulumi preview
| file. To get to full editor support, we'd need to be able to
| read raw Pulumi configuration in all the different languages
| and flavours it comes in. It's definitely on our radar, but
| it's not "simple" addition. I'd recommend following our Pulumi
| issue (https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/187) for
| updates on feature support.
| [deleted]
| Arbortheus wrote:
| 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' 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.
| akh wrote:
| We need to iterate on the output for usage-based resources,
| repeating the same "Monthly cost depends on usage" hundreds of
| times is not great! Maybe summarizing it as "you have 20 Lambda
| functions, all running on US-east-1, with this pricing" is
| better?
|
| 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...
| rattray wrote:
| > I don't really see how you'd be able to improve this
| situation, either
|
| 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?
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| does this include azure, GCP and aws pricing?
|
| what happens when the cloud vendor update their pricing strats?
| hugorut wrote:
| Hey, yes we support azure, GCP and AWS. We continually keep up
| to date with vendors' pricing. You can check out our aggregate
| cloud pricing graphql API for more info
| (https://github.com/infracost/cloud-pricing-api/)
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(page generated 2022-06-29 23:01 UTC)