Show HN: See the impact on your cloud costs as you code https://ift.tt/XSUaAjq

Show HN: See the impact on your cloud costs as you code Hi, my name is Owen and I recently started working at Infracost (YC W21 batch) ( https://infracost.io ). Infracost shows engineers how much their code changes will cost on the cloud before it gets deployed. For example, when an engineer changes a cloud resource (like an AWS virtual machine), Infracost posts a comment in CI/CD telling them "This change is going to increase your costs by 25% next month from $500/m to $625/m". Previously, I was one of the founders of tfsec, the code security scanner; I quickly realised that identifying issues in your code (especially infrastructure code, i.e. Terraform) as soon as possible was the best defence. A lot of the principles of code scanning for security misconfigurations translate well to identifying cost impact. Many times, people are surprised by how cloud resources are priced and how expensive they can be. It is also really unfair that engineers are never given a ‘checkout screen’ when buying infrastructure, and then are blamed for breaking cloud budgets. I believe engineers should have access to key information about cloud costs at the time of writing the code. So, I spent some time and built an Infracost plugin for the IntelliJ family of IDEs ( https://ift.tt/4jiBD02 ). With this plugin installed, as you develop your Terraform code, you will get the cost impact of your current project, and quickly see where the expensive resources are hiding in your code (just hit save & it will recalculate). Two main use cases I’m thinking of: - As you change resources, you can see the cost impact. For example, I increased the instance size from my Dev to Prod environment to handle the prod-sized workloads, and I can see the increase costs. - Comparing costs: I can copy + paste blocks of code and see the cost impact of using different configuration options, like removing multi-AZ options from test environments etc. I can see I save a few thousand dollars per year that way immediately. You can still use Infracost in GitHub/GitLab to automate the cost analysis in CI/CD, and check for best practices, and the IDE tools will help you spot the issues sooner. I’d love to get your feedback on this. I want to know if it is helpful, what other cool features we can add, and how it can be improved. Also if you spot any issues or bugs, let me know! Here is how to install it: https://ift.tt/4jiBD02 I've done a demo video to get you started too - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgfkdmUNzEo August 13, 2024 at 10:00AM