Challenges with setting up Infracost

[alikhajeh1]

Latest update

👉👉👉 The top 3 problems mentioned in this discussion have been solved with the Infracost v0.10 release.
👉👉👉 Checkout the migration guide for details.

---

Challenges with setting up Infracost

We're investigating challenges that users have setting up Infracost. We would love for you to comment on (or vote) on the following questions. You can also add other problems you ran into so we can discuss it with the rest of the community.

[alikhajeh1]

1. Is having access to cloud credentials an issue for you?

Terraform needs access to cloud credentials to generate a plan JSON file (which Infracost uses to generate a cost estimate).

Has this been an issue for you? If yes, are you ok with a potentially less accurate cost estimate? or would you rather go through the pain of setting up cloud creds to get a more accurate estimate?

[AErmie]

For some customers it could be an additional challenge to set up a pipeline with cloud credentials, etc. I'd like to see a default option as the less-accurate estimate, when a mention/notice of "for a more accurate estimate, please use cloud credentials to create a JSON terraform plan file."

[brettcurtis]

We are running Infracost in the same Action workflows that build the infra so credentials are not a problem.

[andylw-cap]

I would suggest having the options for both with and without credentials for those who may require it - be it in a demo or otherwise.

[alikhajeh1]

2. Is having to install the terraform/terragrunt binaries causing you pain?

If yes, is it a pain in on your laptop or in CI/CD?

If it's a pain in CI/CD, I assume you did not already run terraform there?

[AErmie]

It's more of an issue (in my experience) for CI/CD, especially if it's a shared build agent/server environment. This is why I always opt to use a Docker container approach, so it's encapsulated.

For tools (like InfraCost) that require a terraform plan file, I end up running terraform init/plan in a Docker container, and capture the output to be able to pass it into another Docker container (with the target tool, like InfraCost).

[brettcurtis]

Same here, our credentials are available to the workflows already so not a problem.

[alikhajeh1]

3. Is running Infracost (which can trigger terraform init/plan) too slow for you?

If yes, is it it too slow in the CLI, CI, or both? What does "too slow" mean for you?

[AErmie]

"Slow" is relative, of course. I'm curious about the internal workings of InfraCost. There's another tool that I've used (called MegaLinter), that built on the idea of the GitHub Super-Linter, but improved it by running scans in parallel instead of sequentially.

I'm curious if InfraCost does any parallelization of it's execution (if applicable).

[alikhajeh1]

Thanks for the awesome replies @AErmie! The CLI retrieves the cloud prices in parallel; also when a config-file is used then the projects in it are processed in parallel. That has provided significant speed-ups so far. When using the Infracost CLI outside of CI/CD, it caches the Terraform plan for ~30mins (invalidated automatically if something changes) but it's still not as fast as linting tools due to terraform init/plan taking a while...

[brettcurtis]

We've only poked at Infracost for module development and we keep our modules as small as possible so it's been fine there. I'm going to be testing Infracost on a more complex infrastructure build-out involving several different child modules as well as multi-region pretty soon and will report back with any concerns.

[alikhajeh1]

Add your problems!

so we can discuss it in the community

[AErmie]

I know that we've already discussed this previously, but I thought I'd add it here to start the community conversation...

Not everyone uses Terraform, so it would be great if InfraCost supported platform-native languages (ie. ARM and Bicep for Azure, CloudFormation for AWS, the equivalent for GCP).

[AErmie]

Further, for enterprise customers, it would be more appealing if InfraCost could utilize their specific cloud pricing (ie. enterprise discounts, CSP, etc.). That way InfraCost would provide a more realistic estimate, versus pricing based off of the "list" price for the public cloud provider.

[dfrkp]

I'd add the Integration with Terraform Cloud. Specifically, when one uses the VCS integration of Terraform Cloud. In this case I have to run (trigger) an additional run from the CI only to then parse for the plan id so it can be fetched again. This burns CI minutes and slows down the whole process.

[alikhajeh1]

@dfrkp are you referring to TFC Run Tasks or running the CLI manually (which does something like this internally)?

[dfrkp]

@alikhajeh1 thabks for pointing out the cloud run tasks! That looks promising! I was referring to the second link of yours which would start an additional plan in parallel of you use the external pipeline feature with terraform cloud.

[alikhajeh1]

Hey everyone, we're experimenting with parsing HCL to see if we can make it simpler to run Infracost on the CLI/laptops and open-up new use-cases. We'd appreciate it if you try this and create GitHub issues if you find any discrepancies.

[alikhajeh1]

Hi everyone, the top 3 problems mentioned in this discussion have been solved with the Infracost v0.10 release, checkout the migration guide for details.

Thank you for helping!