September 2022: Dashboard Summary, Team Management, Repos, And Projects!

We released a new dashboard summary table, support for team management, and introduced concepts for Repos and Projects. Upgrade to version v0.10.11 to pickup numerous bug fixes and the new features.

We’ve also joined the FinOps Foundation as Infracost Cloud is helping FinOps teams see all upcoming code changes and their cost impact from a central place. There are two use-cases here: the first is to see if a cloud cost increase was due to an infrastructure change, and if so what was the change, who made it and when. The second use-case is to set expectations that an upcoming change will increase cloud costs, so forecasts/budgets can be updated and alerts reset.

Dashboard summary

Cloud bills generally keep increasing. Engineering teams often make lots of optimizations that save money but these get lost in the noise. That’s why we released a new summary table in the dashboard that shows the following breakdown so you can see the cost savings being done by your engineering teams:

• Number of pull requests
• Sum of cost-increasing pull requests
• Sum of cost-reducing pull requests
• Net cost of pull requests

Team management

Cloud costs traverse dev teams, infra teams, engineering management and finance. So we’ve created a new Members page in Infracost Cloud where you can invite your team members to join your organization.

Repos and projects

Infracost enables you to map cloud costs to code so you can understand how your code changes are going to impact your costs. To treat code as a first-class citizen, we’ve introduced the following two concepts:

• Repos, short for code repositories, is where your code lives in GitHub, GitLab or any other source control system. Repo is our top-level required grouping concept. If Infracost cannot detect it, you can provide it via new environment variables, otherwise cost estimates only show in the “All estimates” tab in Infracost Cloud (and not the dashboard, which shows pull request costs).
• Projects are an optional sub-grouping concept within a repo. The majority of Infracost users will have repos that have many projects, these include:
  • code paths for mono repos, each path represents a deployment environment such as dev, stage, prod.
  • workspaces, same idea as above but done using Terraform workspaces, e.g. for dev, stage, prod.
  • Terraform or Terragrunt modules, which are components of a repo, e.g. core-api or data-stack.

Infracost auto-generates project names based on code paths, workspaces or Terraform/Terragrunt modules. You can override this using the new --project-name flag.

Pull request and commit metadata

When you use the infracost comment command, Infracost automatically detects pull request and commit metadata from various CI/CD systems. The metadata is stored in the Infracost JSON output as it is useful to show you what repo, pull request or commit was used to generate the cost estimate. The metadata is also shown in your Infracost Cloud dashboard.

Some users cannot use infracost comment, e.g. users that do not use pull requests, or users that use the Infracost JSON output to post custom pull request comments. For such users, we’ve released a new infracost upload command that lets you define pull request/commit metadata and upload the Infracost JSON output to Infracost Cloud directly.

CLI improvements

Infracost CLI v0.10.11 was released with over 15 bug fixes including:

• New price mappings for azurerm_function_app, azurerm_mysql_flexible_server and aws_lambda_function
• Support for AWS Middle East (UAE) region
• Truncating GitHub comments that are too long

To make it easier to debug issues, we’ve also released a new --debug-report flag that generates a file infracost-debug-report.json; please include this when creating GitHub issues.

Community content

There are now over 600 people in our community Slack! Many thanks to first time contributors @yasmine92, @octogonapusand @mnaghavi. Also shout-out to the following people for sharing their Infracost knowledge with the rest of the community – InfraSocks are coming your way!

• Patrick Koch: Using Infracost to estimate costs for Azure resources defined in Terraform Configurations
• Kosseila H: Terraform live cost estimate using infracost free plugin
• Adam Gardner: Keptn Job Executor Service + Quality Gate

Community call

👉 Join our community call on Tuesday 6 September to discuss the above features and the upcoming Weekly email digests and GitHub App integration!