September 2023: Scan All Repos For Tagging Issues And New Email Reports!

We released major improvements to the tagging policies feature to simplify identifying and fixing tagging issues. We also re-designed the Infracost report emails to summarize key changes across your repos. The CLI also got many bug fixes and big performance improvements.

Log in to Infracost Cloud or upgrade to CLI version v0.10.29 to use the new features.

Tagging policy improvements

Tagging is fundamental to many FinOps capabilities and domains. FinOps, DevOps and Platform teams are responsible for defining tagging policies to enable tasks such as cost allocation and showback. You can use the Infracost tagging policy feature to communicate and enforce required tag keys/values in pull requests; this will also check for typos in tag values. This enables you to shift-left on your tagging practices and provide engineers with fast feedback loops vs asking them to clean up tagging issues post-deployment.

We released three major improvements to the tagging policies feature to simplify identifying and fixing tagging issues.

1. Scan all repos for tagging issues

Enterprises often have hundreds or thousands of code repos. When FinOps or DevOps teams are creating their tagging policy, it is useful to see how all of their repos are doing against the latest policy changes. For example, one recent customer had a policy where all resources have to have a classification tag key with the value being either public or private. After they added this policy, they scanned all of their repos and noticed thousands of cases where the value sensitive was used instead of private. This quick feedback loop enables them to decide whether to allow the new value, or go through and do a search-and-replace to fix the issue.

2. Sort by biggest issues

After you have defined your tagging policy and scanned your repos for issues, the next task is to fix existing issues. We released a new way to show issues for your repos: tagging issues are grouped and sorted by biggest issues, so you can see which issues are going to make the biggest impact and drill-down into those. We now also show you a summary of the issues for each repo, for example “63% of taggable resources (1,190 out of 1,870) in this branch are passing all tagging policies”.

3. Weekly progress chart

Finally, to show you how you are progressing over time, we released a new chart that shows you the percentage of taggable resources passing tagging policies in the last 6 months. This is a weekly chart that is automatically updated when tagging policy fixes are pushed to your main branch. This is the chart that you can use to celebrate engineering teams taking action to improve your FinOps practices 🥳

New email reports

Infracost enables you to setup daily/weekly/monthly reports to summarize the changes being made across your repos. We recently re-designed these emails to focus on three main metrics:

1. Cost changes caused by pull requests, so you can see the portion of costs caused by engineering changes, versus organic changes from things like data transfer.
2. Changes to your tagging policy coverage, so you can see how you are doing vs last week.
3. Costs prevented from being added to your bill due to Guardrails being used.

Performance improvements

We made significant performance improvements to the Infracost CLI as pricing lookups are now cached. Furthermore if you use Terragrunt, you now enjoy a Terragrunt global cache as modules are downloaded once. Upgrade to CLI version v0.10.29 to pickup this improvement 🚀

Other improvements

We also released the following improvements:

• Support for terraform-provider-aws v5 and the new AWS il-central-1 region.
• Config files docs have been simplified. We recommend everyone to setup a config file for their repos, specially if your repos have multiple Terraform projects, such as infrastructure mono repos or Terragrunt repos. Terraform var files/values should also be specified in config files so Infracost knows how to apply them.
• You can now buy Infracost Cloud from the AWS Marketplace; email hello@infracost.io and we’ll make Infracost available in your AWS accounts to be purchased from the AWS Marketplace.
• Added INFRACOST_TERRAFORM_SOURCE_MAP environment variable. This accepts a comma separated list of source=dest pairs, and replaces any matched source URL value found in Terraform module or Terragrunt terraform blocks. This is useful when you have module URLs that are referenced in your infra-as-code repos one way (e.g. using a private URL), but they should use a different URL when Infracost runs them (e.g. using a public URL).
• Added AKS Windows node pools, azurerm_image and azurerm_snapshot resources.

Community content

Many thanks to first time contributor @varshneydevansh and @gdubicki – InfraSocks are coming your way! Also shout-out to the following people for sharing their knowledge with the rest of the community:

• Ivan Porta: Integrating Infracost with Azure DevOps to Improve Terraform Cost Predictability
• Mia Biberovic: How to implement FinOps? Make it easy for the engineers!
• Sourav Kundu: Estimate AWS Cloud resource cost with Infracost, Terraform, and GitHub Actions
• Gordon Byers: Skilling for FinOps in Azure
• Tushar Kumar: How to use Infracost to save your Money on Cloud Infrastructure
• Tyler Robertson: Infracost for Terraform and Cloud Pricing
• Steph Gooch is going to feature Infracost on her awesome The Keys to AWS Optimization YouTube channel

👉 Also, in case you’re wondering, the recent HashiCorp license change does not affect Infracost; we are and will remain compliant going forward. Myself and my co-founder, Hassan, will be at HashiConf in October. Let us know if you’re going to be there too!