Last week David Nunez (Documentation Manager at Stripe) and Stephanie Blotner (Technical Writer, Manager at Uber) sat down with me to review our docs. We also discussed feature-based vs task-based docs and how early-stage startups should think about technical documentation as a key part of their product. David and Stephanie have around 20 years of experience…
It’s estimated that data centers consume around 1% of the global electric supply 1 and this could increase to between 3-13% by 2030 2. The wider ICT (information and communications technology) ecosystem accounts for 2% of the world’s carbon emissions, putting it on par with the entire aviation industry 3. The cloud has revolutionized how we use data centers….
March was busy as we added major new features and had Y Combinator’s demo day, where Hassan (our CEO) delivered an awesome 60 second pitch on a Zoom call with hundreds of investors! You can upgrade to the latest version (v0.8.3) to pickup the new features. If you are using v0.7 (or older) please follow the v0.8 migration guide. 🗒️…
Recently we released a new infracost diff command inspired by git diff. This shows a diff of monthly cloud cost estimates between the current and planned state of Terraform projects. At a high-level this might seems like a simple exercise of subtracting the current state’s cost estimate from the planned state, but cloud costs are rarely that simple to deal…
“Shift left” has become a popular buzzword for both Software Engineering and DevOps. It means introducing processes earlier in the software development cycle. The “shift left” principle started with testing. In a traditional waterfall model testing is performed just before release. Shift left testing started it earlier by introducing practices such as Test-Driven Development (TDD)…
Here’s what we released in February – big thanks to the community contributors! You can upgrade to the latest version (v0.7.20) to pickup these goodies: 🚀 Speed improvements The CLI now only runs terraform init if required since Terraform commands aren’t the fastest in the world (init usually takes 20+ secs for me, but it depends on how many…
Over the last 10 years we’ve seen a lot of shadow IT with AWS being used as the infrastructure provider. The AWS bills were put on company credit cards and expensed. Individual business units could spin up the resources they needed and work in an incredibly agile manner. Unfortunately, for the enterprise as a whole…
Most cloud providers enable users to set budget alerts on their actual cloud spend. This is a critical safety net as usage-based resources could incur a lot of cost (e.g. data transfer). There is also another safety net that companies should set up, and that is catching significant cost changes to their infrastructure before going…
Last week I wrote about giving cloud cost estimates to DevOps teams via pull requests as they make changes to infrastructure components. The hope is to create a “Prius Effect” for cloud costs: it was observed that many Prius drivers would drive more efficiently simply because they were presented with immediate feedback on the Prius dashboard. In…
Over the last 10 years we have seen more enterprises give direct cloud access to their developers and DevOps teams. There are many ways this has been achieved, from giving admin logins to the cloud console, to having devs create request tickets to the central IT team, to creating a self-service catalogue in which business…
Infracost helps developers and DevOps engineers get cost estimates from their IaC (Infrastructure as Code). Here’s an example of it running: The complexity of cloud costs keeps increasing – When we were building PlanForCloud in 2012 AWS had just hit 10,000 different pricing points for their services – now there are over 300,000. We found existing…