October 2022: Usage Pprofiles, GitHub App, Weekly Reports, And Branch Filters!
This month we have something for everyone:
- A new usage profiles feature enabling engineers to get cost estimates based on a low, medium or high usage pattern.
- A GitHub App, so engineering managers can deploy and manage Infracost for hundreds of GitHub repos.
- A weekly reports feature for team leads and FinOps showing them the most impactful upcoming cost changes.
Upgrade to version v0.10.12 and log in to Infracost Cloud to see the new features.
Usage profiles
Companies dealing with a large number of services often find it easier to categorize their service usage or traffic into low/medium/high profiles. This enables them to get a rough cost estimate for many services quickly without defining usage values for each individual resource in those services.
To enable this use-case, the usage file supports a new resource_type_default_usage section that can be used to define usage for a resource type, e.g. aws_dynamodb_table. Resource type defaults can be overridden on a per-resource basis. You can create separate files for different traffic profiles, e.g. low/medium/high, to use with the Infracost breakdown or diff’s --usage-file flag.
GitHub App
If you have tens or hundreds of GitHub repos, it is time consuming to deploy and maintain Infracost across all of these. You want to be able to deploy Infracost across all your repos fast and let all dev teams see the cost implications of their infrastructure changes. We hear you loud and clear!
I’m excited to launch the Infracost GitHub App where you can select the repos to enable Infracost on. GitHub notifies Infracost Cloud of new pull requests, Infracost runs on our infrastructure to post pull request comments, and we scale and maintain the integration. Simple!
| 1. Install the Infracost GitHub App | 2. Get pull request comments |
|---|---|
 |  |
Weekly reports
One of the big benefits of Infracost is that it informs you, as team leads, engineering managers and FinOps practitioners of upcoming infrastructure changes and their cost impact. To make this easier and fit around your workflow, we have released a weekly reports feature.
Weekly reports will list the most impactful pull requests across all repos in your organization, so you can jump-in and take action. You can update your email notification preferences from the new user settings page.
Branch and date filters
Pull requests are often merged into various branches on their way to production, such as development, staging and testing. The Infracost Cloud dashboard now supports two new filters:
- base branch: useful to filter on one branch, such as development, so you can quickly see the most impactful pull requests that should be reviewed.
- date range: useful to filter on a date range where an actual cost spike happened so you can see all of the pull requests that were being worked on at that time (and what repos/users they were from).
CLI improvements
The CLI supports a new environment variable so you can configure the Infracost output currency format, for example running Infracost with INFRACOST_CURRENCY=EUR INFRACOST_CURRENCY_FORMAT="EUR: 1.234,56€" and the total cost “64145.4525” outputs “64.145,45€”.
The CLI JSON output now includes HCL warnings in the project metadata section. This enables Infracost Cloud to show engineers useful information about missing configurations that could be affecting the cost estimates. They can pass-in these variables in a config file or set the environment variables so the CLI can fetch them from Terraform Cloud/GitLab.
Community content
It was great to see Infracost being recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor in the Platform Engineering category: “enterprise IT leaders are setting up platform engineering teams to build and operate self-service internal developer platforms for software delivery and life cycle management”…
Also, Infracost hit 8,000 GitHub stars ⭐ Many thanks to first time contributors @balazs-marjan, @ondrejbilcik and @fatihtokus. Also shout-out to the following people for sharing their knowledge with the rest of the community – InfraSocksare coming your way!
- mkdev.me: Can you automate Cloud Costs? Looking at Infracost and alternatives
- Charles Verleyen: FinOps with Infracost
- Hannes breitfeld: Implement Infracost in your Azure DevOps build pipeline
- Miguel Martin: Proactive cloud cost control with terraform and infracost
Finally, Hassan, our CEO, wrote a blog about the broken relationship between engineering and cloud bill owners, and we added new Products and Security pages to our site.
Up next
👉 We’re looking for early users who want to connect Infracost to their AWS Cost & Usage Reports so they can see usage costs for usage based resources such as S3, Lambda and data transfer in pull request comments too. Email me at hello@infracost.io if you’d like to help.
Join our community call on Tuesday 11 November to discuss the above features and the upcoming usage costs feature!
