May 2023: 100 New Resources, Project-Level Guardrails, Viewer Role & Customer Highlights!

Last month we made a big push to add more than 100 resources across AWS, Azure and Google. Infracost Guardrails now enable you set thresholds against projects inside pull requests. There’s also a new Viewer role, so you can add engineering teams to the view all cost changes, guardrails, and policies.

Log in to Infracost Cloud or upgrade to CLI version v0.10.21 to use the new features.

New resources

We added more than 100 resources across AWS, Azure and Google 🚀 Some of the highlights were AWS OpenSearch, Azure MS SQL, Event Grid, Network Watcher, MS Defender, and various Google compute disk types. Check the list of resources that are supported for AWS, Azure, and Google for details. That takes the total number of supported resources to over 1,100.

Project-level guardrails

Guardrails help you control costs by monitoring pull requests (PRs) and triggering notifications and actions when your defined thresholds are exceeded. Previously you could only define cost or percentage-based thresholds for the whole PR. You can now select the whether a guardrail should be evaluated against the pull request cost as a whole, or against projects individually.

This flexibility is important as projects are a sub-grouping concept within a repo and can be mapped to things like workspaces (e.g., dev/stage/prod) or Terraform modules (e.g., auth/api/dashboard). So you can now create a guardrail that notifies you when any workspace or module increases the costs by, say, 15%. To test this new feature, create a guardrail.

Viewer role

Companies use Infracost to build a culture of cost awareness within their teams and enable cloud costs to shift left. We started building Infracost Cloud to give team leads, managers and FinOps practitioners dashboards, guardrails and centralized cost policies so they can help guide the team. Customers have also told us that they want to give access to Infracost Cloud to all of the engineering teams so they can review detailed breakdowns, and see the total impact of their changes over time.

To enable this to be done at scale safely, we’ve released a new Viewer role, so entire engineering teams can be added and view everything except the API key. Users with this role cannot make any changes or approve guardrails. Try this now from the Org Settings > Members page.

Project data in CSV export

You can export a CSV of all your pull request costs from the Infracost Cloud dashboard, import it into tools such as PowerBI or Tableau, and create custom reports showing your:

• Total Cloud Cost: the costs from your cloud vendor billing exports.
• Merged Pull Requests: the portion of total costs caused by engineering changes, versus organic changes from things like data transfer.
• Open Pull Requests: potential increases that’ll impact your costs in the future, so you are not surprised and can plan accordingly.

To provide better visibility of the cost changes, this CSV now includes four new fields with the per-project costs too: project_previous_monthly_cost, project_new_monthly_cost, project_diff_cost, project_diff_percentage. We’re also developing an API so you can get this data programmatically; contact us if you’d like early access.

Customer highlights

One of our company values is “Ustomer, not customer”. We see us and our customers as one. We like to be a part of their team, and help them however we can. If they’re not successful, then we will not be either so we try to walk in their shoes. It’s more than work – we build relationships and community with users and customers.

Guil Dametto (Director of Cloud Engineering) and Aléxis Mosquera (DevOps Engineer) at Safe Fleet have been rolling out their FinOps process and empowering their engineering teams to use the cloud more efficiently. They are true innovators and are constantly pushing Infracost to its limits. Many of the features we released in the past few months (including the above features) have been in collaboration with them. Thank you Guil, Alexis and the Safe Fleet team 🙌

Madoc Batters (Head of Cloud Centre of Excellence) and Rich Young (Cloud Architect) at Haven – Bourne Leisure are part of another team innovating in the FinOps space. They’re speaking at the first ever FinOps Roadshow, on May 16th in London, on how they’ve built a culture of cost awareness within their teams using Infracost. Join them and other industry experts at the FinOps Roadshow to learn more 🚀

Community content

Many thanks to first time contributors @ABaboshin and @hash-sha512 – InfraSocks are coming your way! Also shout-out to the following people for sharing their knowledge with the rest of the community:

• The Thoughtworks Technology Radar featured Infracost and discussed the importance of engineering teams evaluating costs when making architectural and design decisions.
• The IaC Podcast: Hassan (co-founder of Infracost) joined the IaC Podcast to discuss the shift-left trend that’s happening in cloud costs
• Amit Chaudhari: Shifting Cloud Cost Management Left: Catch Cost Overruns Early in the DevOps Lifecycle
• CodelyTV: Cuánto estoy gastando en mi Infraestructura: Terraform + Infracost