Infracost

It's been 14 years since AWS started supporting resource tags and FinOps teams are still complaining about "our tags are a mess" - why? Everyone knows that without good tags, it's very difficult to create a culture of cost ownership, showback or optimizations. So why are we still wasting so much effort in FinOps and Engineering teams on tagging issues? I think it's because we've not solved the root cause. We treat tagging as a post-deployment task, which makes it a never-ending frustration for FinOps teams as they constantly have to chase Engineering teams to "fix tags". That's also frustrating for Engineering teams as they have to go back and change something they just released. The process is broken, it's not efficient. Shift Left is how we have solved the root cause and the results are mind-blowing 🤯 See the attached screenshots from an Infracost user with 100+ code repos. They went from 9% resources tagged correctly to 90% in 3months. They took 2mins to define their tagging policy in Infracost's dashboard, and engineers starting seeing the exact file+line number they needed to fix as soon as they made a code change. That's the right info (tag typo) in the right place (GitHub) at the right time (as soon as the pull request is opened, BEFORE it is merged and deployed). That's what Shift FinOps Left looks like. It removes the frustrations and gets results quickly.

At the FinOpsX keynote, J.R. Storment mentioned that "FinOps has shifted left" ⬅️ We've been building and enabling that since 2021 with Infracost so it's awesome to see the community recognize the shift in the industry.

Happy Monday 🎉 FinOps X San Diego, we are coming for you! June 19th to 22nd. Here are what our faces look like, come up to the booth and give us a high 5 please. We are nice, and we don't like being alone 🤗

We've got a booth at FinOpsX this year and our flyers just arrived 🥳 Me, Hassan Khajeh-Hosseini, Alistair Scott and Andre Theus are going to be there in San Diego. Who's coming on the Wednesday morning or staying on the Saturday? we could plan something fun...

"Stopped being nice" is a great phrase I saw on Andrey Zhmaylik's FinOps Foundation talk. I think there are two different ways to do this, and the devil is in the details if you want to avoid frustrating engineers 😡 Let me explain: Engineers often use infra-as-code (e.g. Terraform) to manage cloud resources, which means they open pull requests to change code, it gets reviewed, merged, then deployed. When you use AWS Service Control Policies (SCP) or Azure Policy to enforce FinOps policies such as tagging, the deployment step fails (e.g. "terraform apply" fails). That's very frustrating as now the engineer has to go back, create a new pull request, wait for another code review, merge it, then deploy again whilst praying to the policy-gods that it doesn't fail again! The feedback loop is slowwww, specially the code review step as they have to wait for another engineer to review. Sure, they could Slack the other engineer to ask for a quick code review right now, but that interrupts the other engineer and slows down some other task. The general etiquette is to wait for the code review. Some teams have a git workflow where the pull request gets reviewed, deployed, then merged. In this case, the engineer doesn't need to open a new pull request, but usually when they push a change to their already-open pull request, they have to wait for another review. A much better way to do this is to enforce the policy as soon as the initial pull request is created. The engineer gets a nice pull request comment showing them exactly what file and line they should fix, and keep shipping fast 🚢 That avoids the whole second wait-loop! Not only is the second option much nicer for engineers, it also has a benefit for FinOps practitioners: you don't need to re-implement the same tagging/FinOps policies between cloud vendors as they are being enforced at the infra-as-code layer! The second option is what we've built with Infracost 🚀 https://lnkd.in/gQ4dyt2p is an example. Let me know if you want a demo! #finops #shiftleft #cloudcosts

Happy Monday! Alrighty, me and Steph Gooch sat down to talk about Shifting FinOps Left with Infracost <<< And it is now live on The Keys to AWS Optimization 💰 What we don't show you is us talking about Swag (look at the wall of Caps behind Steph!) haha Steph - we should do a live video walkthrough of FinOps X's best SWAG in June! We go around looking at swag and rating them 🎉 Here is the video - and as all famous YouTubes say, please like, share and leave a comment 🤓 https://lnkd.in/g7mCNxhs #finops #aws #cloudcosts #optimization

Happy Tuesday ☺️ Okay, so this year we (Infracost) are going to go to the FinOps Foundation Conference (June 19th to 22nd). We have a booth, and we need to design it. Help me and Artur pick one from our options please 🙏🏽 Which one do you like more? What do you like and don't like? Once we gather all of it, I'll let you know what we went with! HERE WE GO! Shift FinOps Left!! #finops #finopsx

Look at how beautiful Edinburgh Castle is in the fog. Okay, now look at the MASSIVE cloud cost increase from AWS: If you are using old version of AWS RDS, or EKS, you need to upgrade these. AWS is going to start charging heavily (up to 600% more), to incentivise people to prioritize moving off of old versions to new versions. Look out for these 😊 We've added these FinOps policies into Infracost Cloud, so to see exactly where you are using these in your codebase, go to the dashboard > Governance > FinOps policies, and you'll see them 💜 #finops #aws #cloud #cloudcosts

Good morning FinOps friends (it's 10:30pm here, but I assume you will read this tomorrow). You have your coffee in hand? Sitting comfortably? AWS just announced applying tags retroactively! Don't spill your coffee, it's not that amazing... "Previously, when AWS customers activated resource tags for cost allocation purposes, the tags only took effect prospectively. For example, if a tag was added to a resource in February, but activated as Cost Allocation Tag on March 10th, the cost would only be tagged from March 10th onwards. Now, customers can submit a backfill request, specifying the duration of time they want the Cost Allocation Tags to be backfilled. Once the backfill is complete, the cost and usage data from prior months will be tagged with the current Cost Allocation Tags." Only 1 backfill request at a time; and also once request per 24 hours 🤷🏽♂️ Here is the docs: https://lnkd.in/gXmnQfWt And here is the announcement: https://lnkd.in/gCD-ME9w #finops #aws #cloudcosts

At Port, we have a Slack channel called TIL for ‘today I learned’ - where anyone from any department can share anything they’ve found interesting. Our engineering team actively shares numerous tools that they’ve come across that they think could benefit others in the company. Many of these tools are particularly helpful for developers to aid their experience and productivity. In this blog, Zohar Einy shares 10 of the top developer productivity tool recommendations from our R&D team at Port, so that you too can benefit. Infracost, DX, Vimium, GitHub, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Codeium #developerproductivity #devex #platformengineering