FinOps Policies: Automate Best Practices Now

Today, we’re very excited to announce a new FinOps policies capability for Infracost Cloud. You can now check for FinOps best practices directly in engineering workflows before infrastructure code has been deployed. This has many benefits:

• It shortens the feedback cycle for engineers, and boosts developer productivity.
• It encourages engineers to write efficient infrastructure code from the outset.
• FinOps teams don’t have the continual effort of urging engineers to adhere to best practices. This saves significant amounts of wasted spend in the cloud!

Helping engineers with FinOps

Pop quiz: which of the 46 out of the 800 EC2 instance types are “previous generation”? it’s very hard to keep track of this. AWS, Azure, and Google provide recommendations in their documentation and Well-Architected Frameworks to help companies optimize their cloud costs. However, most engineers don’t know about them. They also don’t have time to trawl through docs each time they write infrastructure code to figure this out.

Let’s work through an example. On AWS, a m3.large instance with 7.5 GiB of memory and two vCPUs has a monthly cost of $97. Whereas an m5.large instance has similar amount of memory/vCPUs; it also has faster processors with enhanced networking and costs just $70. That's a 27% saving for a more performant machine!

Knowing the applicable best practices as engineers develop infrastructure code makes it easy to follow; changing an instance type before deployment is a 1-line change. But once that instance is deployed, it takes significantly more time to change. It is no longer a simple code change in the editor; it now requires a new deployment and potential downtime.

The new FinOps policies feature plugs into the engineering workflow (pull requests) and checks if code changes follow best practices. This makes engineers more productive as they get fast feedback and write more efficient infrastructure code from the get-go vs having to re-do things post-deployment. This also frees FinOps teams from having to suggest best practices to engineers and ultimately prevents significant amounts of money from being wasted in the cloud.

What Infracost customers are saying:

Check your code for FinOps policies now:

When you add Infracost to your infrastructure code repos, it scans your code and checks for 40 AWS, Azure, and Google FinOps policies out of the box. This gives you immediate analytics on how well you follow the best practices. Furthermore, when engineers send pull requests to make code changes, Infracost shows them the exact file and line numbers they need to change to follow the FinOps policies, alongside an explanation about why it’s important to consider implementing the change.

Sign up for a free trial of Infracost Cloud to get started with FinOps policies, or visit our docs to learn more.

Originally published at https://www.infracost.io on October 23, 2023.