CloudBurn

About CloudBurn

What if you could peer into the financial future of your infrastructure code before it ever runs? CloudBurn is a transformative tool designed for engineering teams who use Terraform or AWS CDK to manage their cloud infrastructure. It addresses a critical, often painful gap in the development lifecycle: the disconnect between writing infrastructure-as-code and understanding its cost implications. Traditionally, teams discover budget overruns weeks later on their AWS bill, long after resources are provisioned and costs are accumulating. CloudBurn fundamentally changes this dynamic by injecting real-time cost intelligence directly into the code review process. Whenever a developer opens a pull request with infrastructure changes, CloudBurn automatically analyzes the diff using live AWS pricing data and posts a detailed cost report as a comment. This creates a powerful feedback loop, empowering teams to discuss, optimize, and adjust expensive configurations while the changes are still in development and easy to modify. It’s a proactive shield against budgetary surprises, transforming cost management from a reactive, finance-led scramble into an integrated, engineering-led practice.

Features of CloudBurn

Automated Pull Request Cost Analysis

CloudBurn seamlessly integrates into your existing GitHub workflow to provide automatic financial oversight. Every time a pull request containing Terraform or AWS CDK changes is opened, the tool springs into action. It captures the infrastructure diff, processes it against real-time AWS pricing APIs, and generates a comprehensive cost report. This report is then posted directly back into the pull request conversation, ensuring cost visibility is an inherent part of every code review without requiring any manual intervention from your team.

Real-Time, Region-Specific AWS Pricing

Forget about outdated spreadsheets or generic estimates. CloudBurn pulls live pricing data directly from AWS, ensuring every cost calculation is accurate and reflective of the current market rates. Crucially, it factors in your specific deployment region and accounts for the exact usage types and instance families defined in your code. This granularity provides confidence that the estimated monthly cost you see is a true representation of what you will be billed, down to the individual resource level.

Resource-Level Cost Breakdown & Diff

The tool provides exceptional clarity by breaking down costs for each individual resource affected by the change. Its report clearly delineates between existing resources and new ones, showing the current cost, the new projected monthly cost, and the delta for each item. This resource-by-resource breakdown, complete with descriptions and usage types, allows developers to immediately identify which specific line of code is driving a cost increase and make informed decisions during the review.

Seamless Integration with CI/CD

CloudBurn is built to fit into modern development practices, acting as an automated FinOps guardrail within your CI/CD pipeline. By leveraging GitHub Actions for Terraform Plan or AWS CDK Diff, the tool becomes a silent, continuous checkpoint. This integration bakes cost governance directly into the deployment workflow, ensuring no infrastructure change slips through to production without its financial impact being considered and documented for the entire team.

Use Cases of CloudBurn

Preventing Costly Misconfigurations in Development

A developer working on a new feature might inadvertently specify a t3.xlarge instance instead of a t3.micro, or provision a database with excessive provisioned IOPS. Without CloudBurn, this mistake would only be caught on the next monthly bill. With CloudBurn, the $100+ monthly cost delta is highlighted in the PR immediately, prompting a discussion and a quick fix before the code is merged, preventing wasted spend from the very beginning.

Enabling Informed Architectural Decisions During Design Reviews

When a team is debating between two different architectural approaches—for example, using Lambda functions versus long-running EC2 instances for a background job—theoretical debates can be settled with data. By creating draft PRs for each approach, CloudBurn can provide concrete, comparable monthly cost estimates for each design pattern, allowing the team to make a cost-informed decision that balances performance, maintainability, and budget.

Establishing a Team Culture of Cost Awareness

CloudBurn acts as an educational tool that raises collective financial literacy within the engineering team. By making costs a visible and routine part of every infrastructure change, it encourages developers to think critically about resource selection and configuration. Over time, this fosters a "cost-conscious" engineering culture where optimizing for efficiency becomes a natural part of the development process, not an afterthought.

Streamlining FinOps and Budget Governance Processes

For platform and FinOps teams, CloudBurn provides an automated, scalable way to enforce cost governance without becoming a bottleneck. Instead of manually reviewing every infrastructure change or setting up rigid policy blocks, they can rely on CloudBurn to surface cost data where decisions are made. This creates a collaborative environment where developers are empowered with information, and finance/ops teams have the visibility they need without impeding development velocity.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does CloudBurn calculate the cost estimates?

CloudBurn calculates estimates by analyzing the output of your terraform plan or cdk diff command. It extracts the resource types, configurations, and regions from this diff and queries the official AWS Price List API in real-time. It then computes the projected monthly cost based on 730 hours of usage (24/7 operation) for on-demand resources, providing a clear, apples-to-apples comparison for the changes in the pull request.

Is my code or AWS pricing data sent to CloudBurn's servers?

No, your actual Terraform or CDK source code is not sent to CloudBurn. The system only processes the textual output of the plan or diff command, which contains resource definitions but not your business logic. This output and the calculated cost data are transmitted securely. AWS pricing data is fetched by CloudBurn from AWS's public API, not from your account.

What happens if my resources don't run 24/7?

The monthly cost estimate provided is a projection based on continuous (730-hour) operation to give a standardized, worst-case view for comparison. It is designed to highlight the relative cost impact of one resource versus another. For accurate forecasting of actual bills for non-24/7 resources (like auto-scaling groups or batch jobs), you would use AWS Cost Explorer or similar tools post-deployment, informed by the baseline costs CloudBurn helped you establish.

Can I use CloudBurn with private Terraform modules or in a private GitHub repository?

Yes, CloudBurn supports private repositories and private modules. The integration works through GitHub Actions, which has access to your repository contents during workflow execution. As long as the terraform plan or cdk diff can generate its output within your CI/CD environment, CloudBurn can analyze it. You maintain control over which repositories have the GitHub App installed.