November 2022: Actual Costs, Data Transfer Costs, And Pull Requests Status Filters!
This month, we have a few big changes:
- Actual costs and data transfer costs are in private beta.
- See the status of all pull requests (open, merged, closed, deployed) and filter based on that to see their cost impact.
- Slice and dice for all! Export to CSV.
- Buy Infracost without talking to Hassan 😁 and public pricing.
Upgrade to version v0.10.13 and log in to Infracost Cloud to see the new features.
Actual costs and data transfer
Cloud costs are a spectrum: when a new system is being designed, you can get a rough cost estimate; when you have infrastructure code, Infracost can generate estimates automatically. That automation is now used by thousands of companies and enables engineers to see costs in pull requests and avoid surprises. But cloud costs don’t stop when the pull request is merged and deployed. Instead a new data set becomes available: actual cost and usage data.
We’re excited to launch actual costs for AWS in private beta! Infracost Cloud now enables you to see actual costs using your AWS account’s Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) in pull request comments, VSCode and CLI output.
Email us if you’re interested in working with us during the private beta to explore how this data can be exposed in your workflows, and how we should handle Savings Plans and Reserved Instances. Depending on how this phase goes, we can plan similar functionality for Azure and Google.
Pull request status filter
When you’ve enabled everyone in the company to launch infrastructure as and when needed, you need an overview of what is actually happening. This is why we built Infracost Cloud, a single place to look at all pull requests (PRs) along with their cost impact. This let’s you do two things:
- Review cost estimates of all PRs from a central place before they hit the bill.
- Have an audit trail of pull requests that increase or decrease costs the most, by how much, and by whom, so you quickly find the right people to talk to.
You can now filter on the PR status to achieve this! You can say “show me all PRs that are open, so I can review the biggest cost impacting ones”, or “show me all merged PRs in the last month that went into the main branch”. The status works out of the box for GitHub App integration, and you can also use our API to set the status for other CI/CD systems.
Export to CSV
Slice and dice however you want. We get it, everyone has a different requirement on how they’d like to slice and dice and see data. CSV for all!
The Infracost Cloud dashboard now supports an export to CSV feature, which will export all the data including PR title, repo, project, branch, PR URL, status of the PR, opened date, merged date, cost impact (before and after code changes), diff etc.
Buy Infracost without talking to Hassan!
Over the last two months, Hassan (our CEO) had over 100 discussions with users about how to charge for Infracost Cloud. Should it be based on cloud bills, number of PRs, number of repos, what about how much money they have saved. Pricing is always hard, but we have arrived at a good starting point!
$50 per seat per month. “Okay, but how do you count seats?” I hear you ask.
A seat is needed for anyone making infrastructure changes (count the author of a pull requests in that month), and those who need access to the Infracost Cloud dashboard. We also measure based on a “high water mark”, meaning a seat isn’t tied to a person. If you have bough 10 seats, any 10 people can use those seats in a given month.
For example, in a company with 400 employees, ~20 people might be making infrastructure changes; FinOps practitioners and directors of platform/engineering would need access to Infracost Cloud too, so the company probably needs less than 25 seats. If you don’t know how many seats you might need, just reach out, and we can send you a script that counts your required seats in the last month. We also will start doing bundled seats, so if you need more than 20 seats, reach out to us.
Other updates
We also released a few other updates:
- Fixed bugs in the
aws_fsx_windows_file_systemand Azure resources caused by Azure updating their pricing. - Hide the “Module path” column in pull request comments if it’s empty.
- Upgraded the CLI to golang 1.19.
- Fixed a Terragrunt issue in Atlantis integration.
- Add IPv6 support to Cloud Pricing API.
Community content
Many thanks to first time contributors @jgrumboe, @bmbferreira and @joshpollara. Also shout-out to the following people for sharing their knowledge with the rest of the community – InfraSocks are coming your way!
- Chaitanya Sistla: Having trouble keeping up with infrastructure cost utilization?
- Hila Fish: Terraform Practices – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly presented at HashiConf 2022
- William Collins: Calculating Cost Like a DevOps Boss with Infracost and AWS
- Arif Khan: 5 Things to do to become a DevOps Engineer
- Technology Radar featured Infracost
Up next
👉 We’re looking for early users who want to work with us to develop cost saving recommendations in the engineering workflow. Email me at hello@infracost.io if you’d like to help.
Join our community call on Tuesday 8 November to discuss the above features!
