<story><title>Show HN: See the impact on your cloud costs as you code</title><text>Hey folks, my name is Owen and I recently started working at a startup (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;infracost.io&amp;#x2F;&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;infracost.io&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) that shows engineers how much their code changes are going to cost on the cloud before being deployed (in CI&amp;#x2F;CD like GitHub or GitLab). Previously,&lt;p&gt;I was one of the founders of tfsec (it scanned code for security issues). One of the things I learnt was if we catch issues early, i.e. when the engineer was typing their code, we save a bunch of time.&lt;p&gt;I was thinking … okay, why not build cloud costs into the code editor. Show the cloud cost impact of the code as the engineers are writing it.&lt;p&gt;So I spent some weekends and built one right into JetBrains - fully free - keep in mind it is new, might be buggy, so please let me know if you find issues. It is check it out: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;plugins.jetbrains.com&amp;#x2F;plugin&amp;#x2F;24761-infracost&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;plugins.jetbrains.com&amp;#x2F;plugin&amp;#x2F;24761-infracost&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I recorded a video too, if you just want to see what it does:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=kgfkdmUNzEo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=kgfkdmUNzEo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d love to get your feedback on this. I want to know if it is helpful, what other cool features we can add to it, and how can we make it better?&lt;p&gt;Final note - the extension calls our Cloud Pricing API, which holds 4 million prices from AWS, Azure and GCP, so no secrets, credentials etc are touched at all.&lt;p&gt;If you want to get the same Infracost goodness in your CI&amp;#x2F;CD, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.infracost.io&amp;#x2F;cicd&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.infracost.io&amp;#x2F;cicd&lt;/a&gt;</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pclmulqdq</author><text>What about money doesn&amp;#x27;t matter to a company?  Why should you isolate an engineer from that as though it doesn&amp;#x27;t matter?&lt;p&gt;As an electrical engineer, we scrounged for every cent on devices when they were being released.  A TVS diode can be replaced with a capacitor?  That&amp;#x27;s a cent.  A cheaper processor?  Several tens of cents.  Over ten million devices plus the legacy of your design into the next generations, that&amp;#x27;s a lot of money.  Someone else negotiates the price of the TVS diode and the processor, but that doesn&amp;#x27;t mean you should be isolated from the cost.  A thing that does X and is more expensive is worse than a thing that does X cheaply.&lt;p&gt;Software engineers spend fractional cents on requests executed thousands of times per second.  That&amp;#x27;s the same scale as the electrical engineering example when you do this.&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, most good software engineers are very cost aware.  That doesn&amp;#x27;t mean they don&amp;#x27;t do stuff.  They just understand the cost of that stuff.  This does seem to be a big divide between senior and junior engineers, as well.</text></item><item><author>jbs789</author><text>I have more macro questions about this. Sometimes I find engineers aren’t best placed to evaluate cost at all. What might be perceived as expensive (say relative to a salary) is not expensive at all in the context of the business problem being solved.&lt;p&gt;Think there’s a book called “measure what matters” and the idea is what we measure shapes companies and behaviour. So I’d be very careful about implementing anything like this in my org.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>doix</author><text>The &amp;quot;problem&amp;quot; with software is that the margins are &amp;quot;too high&amp;quot;, so companies _usually_ don&amp;#x27;t care. The general attitude I&amp;#x27;ve encountered is that the engineering salary dominates the cost, so it&amp;#x27;s usually not worth spending time optimizing runtime costs.&lt;p&gt;This is eventually taken to the extreme and you occasionally see posts here titled something like &amp;quot;how we saved millions by doing X&amp;quot;, where the thing they were originally doing was extremely wasteful.&lt;p&gt;For the last decade, we&amp;#x27;ve also been in a &amp;quot;free money&amp;quot; mode. Where companies were happy to spend money as long as it led to growth. Optimizing for cost wasn&amp;#x27;t a priority.&lt;p&gt;That has leaked into electrical engineering as well. There were a few products that shipped full Raspberry pis in an enclosure in the name of velocity. The savings possible there were probably in the dollars, not cents, not to mention the supply chain issues. And yet companies did it in the name of velocity.</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: See the impact on your cloud costs as you code</title><text>Hey folks, my name is Owen and I recently started working at a startup (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;infracost.io&amp;#x2F;&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;infracost.io&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) that shows engineers how much their code changes are going to cost on the cloud before being deployed (in CI&amp;#x2F;CD like GitHub or GitLab). Previously,&lt;p&gt;I was one of the founders of tfsec (it scanned code for security issues). One of the things I learnt was if we catch issues early, i.e. when the engineer was typing their code, we save a bunch of time.&lt;p&gt;I was thinking … okay, why not build cloud costs into the code editor. Show the cloud cost impact of the code as the engineers are writing it.&lt;p&gt;So I spent some weekends and built one right into JetBrains - fully free - keep in mind it is new, might be buggy, so please let me know if you find issues. It is check it out: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;plugins.jetbrains.com&amp;#x2F;plugin&amp;#x2F;24761-infracost&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;plugins.jetbrains.com&amp;#x2F;plugin&amp;#x2F;24761-infracost&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I recorded a video too, if you just want to see what it does:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=kgfkdmUNzEo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=kgfkdmUNzEo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d love to get your feedback on this. I want to know if it is helpful, what other cool features we can add to it, and how can we make it better?&lt;p&gt;Final note - the extension calls our Cloud Pricing API, which holds 4 million prices from AWS, Azure and GCP, so no secrets, credentials etc are touched at all.&lt;p&gt;If you want to get the same Infracost goodness in your CI&amp;#x2F;CD, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.infracost.io&amp;#x2F;cicd&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.infracost.io&amp;#x2F;cicd&lt;/a&gt;</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pclmulqdq</author><text>What about money doesn&amp;#x27;t matter to a company?  Why should you isolate an engineer from that as though it doesn&amp;#x27;t matter?&lt;p&gt;As an electrical engineer, we scrounged for every cent on devices when they were being released.  A TVS diode can be replaced with a capacitor?  That&amp;#x27;s a cent.  A cheaper processor?  Several tens of cents.  Over ten million devices plus the legacy of your design into the next generations, that&amp;#x27;s a lot of money.  Someone else negotiates the price of the TVS diode and the processor, but that doesn&amp;#x27;t mean you should be isolated from the cost.  A thing that does X and is more expensive is worse than a thing that does X cheaply.&lt;p&gt;Software engineers spend fractional cents on requests executed thousands of times per second.  That&amp;#x27;s the same scale as the electrical engineering example when you do this.&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, most good software engineers are very cost aware.  That doesn&amp;#x27;t mean they don&amp;#x27;t do stuff.  They just understand the cost of that stuff.  This does seem to be a big divide between senior and junior engineers, as well.</text></item><item><author>jbs789</author><text>I have more macro questions about this. Sometimes I find engineers aren’t best placed to evaluate cost at all. What might be perceived as expensive (say relative to a salary) is not expensive at all in the context of the business problem being solved.&lt;p&gt;Think there’s a book called “measure what matters” and the idea is what we measure shapes companies and behaviour. So I’d be very careful about implementing anything like this in my org.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bongodongobob</author><text>&amp;gt; Why should you isolate an engineer from that as though it doesn&amp;#x27;t matter?&lt;p&gt;Because it&amp;#x27;s not their job and therefore they don&amp;#x27;t have the information necessary to know what is or isn&amp;#x27;t expensive.&lt;p&gt;Their job is to come up with the best design using common sense when it comes to cost.&lt;p&gt;Cost of a part isn&amp;#x27;t the only thing that matters either. Ok, we can save 1 cent if we swap this part out. But now we have to purchase lot sizes that are 10x bigger. How does that impact production? How does that affect operational budgets? Etc.&lt;p&gt;The engineers engineer and the bean counters count beans. They meet and find a happy place.&lt;p&gt;Why would you even want that extra workload? The fact that you think it&amp;#x27;s so easy just goes to show why actual accountants do the accounting, managers do the managing, procurement does the procuring, and operations does the operating.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I know calculus, accounting is easy!&amp;quot; Sure, if you throw out all of the variables other than unit cost.</text></comment>