To a certain extent I agree - I've worked on projects where a resource amounts to a rounding error in the overall cloud bill; for many organizations, cost is an important NFR for a project.

Going off the other threads of this post, how much engineers should know or care about billing seems to be open for debate; I think an engineer needs to appreciate that often cost is one of the many trade-offs that need to be accounted for

I just gave this a try with https://github.com/eksctl-io/eksctl/blob/main/examples/01-si...

ChatGPT gave me a decent chuck of terraform and running Infracost against it gave me a $515 monthly cost.

If you go to the settings of the plugin and get the absolute path of infracost binary then run

infracost breakdown --path .

in the dir with the terraform, does it give you a breakdown?

Hey Itay, thanks, and thanks for commenting, great to hear from you!!

The next step is certainly to look at the cloud account to get information on usage - this completes the picture of both for intended resources to create and what is already there.

Thanks for the feedback

Great feedback - thanks

Hey, thanks for the question - Infracost does three things at the moment: Cost estimation before code is merged (and this is what is in JetBrains now with this plugin); then it checks the code for best practices being followed (like if the code is using old instance types, or old volume types, or there is no retention policies in place etc), it will tell the engineers exactly how to fix those. and finally, it also checks to make sure all resources are tagged properly both with the key and value being checked. Again it tells the engineer how to fix it if there isn an issue.

So overall, the two main benefits are cost avoidance, and then engineering time saving or toil reduction, since all the issues get fixed before the code is merged. The product is being used by over 3,000 companies now in CI/CD; we have a few case studies on the website: https://www.infracost.io/safe-fleet/

Thanks for the feedback - appreciate the comments on the video, I can see that without audio the first minute or so is a bit dull -

Hope this Gif is clearer - https://github.com/infracost/jetbrains-infracost/blob/244ee8...

It’s much improved! My last feedback would be to zoom your editor a lot more so folks on mobile can see things better :)

You're right, there are multiple roles for FinOps in an organization from the engineer up to finance and engineering management.

This is tackling one aspect of this - highlighting the cost to the engineer.

Why not provide it to them all then? Have you considered piping your results to a (possibly cloud hosted) dashboard that might offer (possibly aggregated) real-time cost estimates to people higher up the corporate chain? A high-level view of the cost of what is being created, if you will.

This is effectively what Infracost Cloud is (https://www.infracost.io/)

It adds things like management of guardrails and policies that can be maintained by a finops role, or engineering manager. PRs can block or notify if thresholds are going to be breached by a specific PR.

Our cost api is very regularly updated from the pricing data made available by the cloud providers.

Metadata about the resources that require cost estimation are rolled up and sent to the pricing API, it's generally pretty quick process even with large projects

Thanks, that's generally more readily available in the billing explorer for most cloud providers.

There is a definite case for pulling usage data from the cloud account to make suggestions about right sizing though, that's a definite roadmap item