Cloud costs are shifting left

Alistair Scott — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 16:02:31 +0000

What is "shift left"?

"Shift left" has become a popular buzzword for both Software Engineering and DevOps. It means introducing processes earlier in the software development cycle.

The "shift left" principle started with testing. In a traditional waterfall model testing is performed just before release. Shift left testing started it earlier by introducing practices such as Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD).

We are now seeing the "shift left" principle applied to other disciplines. Continuous delivery platforms allow engineering teams to deploy frequently and integrate a suite of tools into their cycle. The term DevSecOps has been coined. The idea behind it is to introduce security as early as possible in the software development cycle. This has given rise to a whole ecosystem of tools to help implement this practice. Companies like Snyk and Anchore integrate automated security scanning into DevOps workflows so teams can proactively find and fix vulnerabilities.

Can you shift too far left?

There's an argument that "shifting left" gives too much work and responsibility to engineering teams. This can be the case if the right tooling is not available.

"Shift left" isn't about performing one-off tasks earlier in the cycle, and this is where the name causes some confusion. It's about introducing processes and automation earlier and performing them continuously throughout development.

When a company introduces a "shift left" mentality it is important that it doesn't impact developer velocity. Tools that help here should fit into developers' workflows and show them the right level of information at the right time.

Will cloud cost shift left?

Currently cloud costs aren't discussed until they become a problem. A common story is when cloud costs become a problem, companies will set a top-down directive and form a team to reduce their spend by X%. They manage to fix the immediate pain but after six to twelve months the problem returns.

Cloud costs aren't a one-off problem that can be solved. That's why it's inevitable that cloud costs will "shift left". Building a cost-aware engineering team is crucial to keep cloud bills under control.

That's why we built Infracost. We help engineering teams implement this culture of cost-awareness without impacting their velocity. You can integrate Infracost directly into your existing workflow to see cost information throughout your DevOps process. Check out our integrations for instructions.

Infracost - cloud costs for devs

Alistair Scott — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 12:54:41 +0000

Infracost helps developers and DevOps engineers get cost estimates from their IaC (Infrastructure as Code). Here's an example of it running:

The complexity of cloud costs keeps increasing - When we were building PlanForCloud in 2012 AWS had just hit 10,000 different pricing points for their services - now there are over 300,000.

We found existing tools fit in too late in the process and are not aimed at the people in control of the infrastructure. It's difficult to get cost estimations when you are building and deploying your services, which often leads to bill shock and no easy way to track down these costs. So we wanted to build a CLI tool that can plug into your existing development and operations processes and bring cost visibility to the engineers.

Currently Infracost supports AWS and Terraform, but we will add support for more cloud vendors (GCP, Azure) and other IaC tools (Pulumi).

Update 25 Nov 2020 : We have now added initial support for Google cloud.

We also want to go beyond just the baseline costs of infrastructure - data transfer costs and other usage-based costs can often be a significant portion of a cloud bill, and are also the hardest to predict and track down. If you have any ideas about the best way to handle these then please reach out to me on Twitter.

Infracost is open source, you can check it out at https://github.com/infracost/infracost.

DEV Community: Alistair Scott

Cloud costs are shifting left

What is "shift left"?

Can you shift too far left?

Will cloud cost shift left?

Infracost - cloud costs for devs