CloudBurn

About CloudBurn

CloudBurn is a proactive FinOps and infrastructure cost management platform designed for engineering teams utilizing Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) with Terraform or AWS CDK. It fundamentally shifts the paradigm of cloud cost management from reactive bill-shock to proactive, informed decision-making. The tool is built for developers, platform engineers, and DevOps teams who are tired of discovering costly infrastructure misconfigurations weeks after deployment, buried in a daunting AWS invoice. CloudBurn's core value proposition is its seamless integration into the existing developer workflow, specifically the pull request (PR) process. By automatically analyzing IaC changes against real-time AWS pricing data, it generates an immediate, granular cost impact report directly within the code review interface. This creates a crucial financial feedback loop, empowering teams to discuss, optimize, and adjust resource specifications before code is merged and deployed, thereby preventing expensive mistakes from ever reaching production. It transforms cost awareness from a periodic, finance-led activity into a continuous, engineering-led practice, embedding fiscal responsibility directly into the CI/CD pipeline.

Features of CloudBurn

Automated Pull Request Cost Analysis

CloudBurn automatically triggers a cost analysis on every pull request that contains changes to Terraform or AWS CDK configurations. There is no manual intervention required; the system detects the infrastructure diff, processes it, and posts a detailed report as a comment in the PR thread. This ensures that cost visibility is not an optional or forgotten step but an integral, non-blocking part of every infrastructure change, fostering a culture of cost-aware development from the very first line of code changed.

Real-Time, Region-Specific AWS Pricing

The platform does not rely on outdated or estimated pricing models. It pulls real-time, on-demand pricing data directly from AWS Price List API, specific to the region and service configuration defined in your code. This ensures that the cost estimates you see for a new EC2 instance type, EBS volume size, or Fargate task definition are accurate and reflective of the current market rates, providing reliable data for confident decision-making during reviews.

Granular Resource-Level Cost Breakdown

CloudBurn provides more than just a top-line total. Its reports break down the cost impact per individual resource, showing the current cost (if any) and the new projected monthly cost. This granularity, as seen in example reports listing instances and task definitions, allows developers to pinpoint exactly which change is driving cost increases, facilitating targeted discussions about downsizing, using alternative instance families, or adjusting auto-scaling configurations to optimize spend without compromising performance.

Seamless GitHub Integration & Security

Setup and billing are handled entirely through the GitHub Marketplace, requiring no separate account creation or sensitive credential management on a third-party platform. Permissions are scoped via GitHub's OAuth, ensuring CloudBurn only accesses the repositories you explicitly install it on. This "secure-by-design" approach minimizes operational overhead and security concerns, allowing teams to gain immediate value with just a few clicks, backed by the trust and infrastructure of the GitHub ecosystem.

Use Cases of CloudBurn

Preventing Costly Development & Testing Environment Sprawl

Development and staging environments are often provisioned with over-specified resources "just to be safe," leading to massive waste. With CloudBurn, when a developer opens a PR to spin up a new testing environment, the team can immediately see if the chosen instance types are unnecessarily large (e.g., a t3.xlarge instead of a t3.micro). Costs are discussed and right-sized during the PR review, preventing expensive sprawl from being codified and deployed.

Enforcing Cost Governance in Platform Engineering

Platform and FinOps teams can use CloudBurn as an automated governance guardrail. By making cost implications visible to every contributor, it decentralizes cost accountability. Teams can establish informal policies or formal checks, ensuring that any PR proposing resources exceeding a certain cost threshold receives extra scrutiny or requires approval, thereby proactively controlling cloud spend without creating bureaucratic bottlenecks.

Optimizing Infrastructure Refactoring and Upgrades

When planning a major upgrade, such as migrating to a new database instance family or implementing a new caching layer, engineers can create feature branches and PRs to model the change. CloudBurn provides the financial data to compare the cost of the proposed new architecture against the current baseline, enabling data-driven decisions that balance performance, resilience, and cost before committing to a potentially expensive new direction.

Educating Developers on AWS Cost Implications

CloudBurn serves as an excellent real-time educational tool. Junior developers or teams new to AWS can learn the direct cost consequences of their infrastructure choices in the context of their actual work. Seeing that a simple parameter change can add hundreds to the monthly bill creates powerful, immediate learning that abstract documentation or training cannot match, building a more cost-conscious engineering culture over time.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does CloudBurn calculate the cost estimates?

CloudBurn calculates estimates by parsing the infrastructure diff from your Terraform plan or AWS CDK synthesis output. It extracts the resource types, configurations (like instance types, storage sizes, and regions), and queries the official AWS Price List API in real-time to fetch the current on-demand hourly rates. It then extrapolates these to a monthly cost based on 730 hours of continuous operation, providing a clear, comparable figure for review purposes.

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

No, your actual IaC source code or AWS credentials are not sent to CloudBurn. The system works by analyzing the output of your terraform plan or cdk diff commands, which is typically executed securely within your own GitHub Actions workflow. This plan/diff output, which contains resource definitions but not secrets, is sent for pricing analysis. Your AWS credentials remain solely within your GitHub environment.

Can CloudBurn analyze costs for existing infrastructure or only new changes?

The primary focus is on analyzing the delta or change proposed in a pull request. Its report shows a comparison between the current state (often $0.00 for new resources) and the proposed new state. While it is not a full cloud cost management platform for analyzing entire existing bills, its power lies in preventing cost growth from new changes and modifications to existing resources.

What happens after the 14-day Pro trial ends?

After the 14-day Pro trial, you can choose to subscribe to the paid Pro plan for continued access to all features, including analysis on private repositories and priority support. If you choose not to subscribe, you can continue using the Community plan forever, which offers core functionality but may have limitations compared to the Pro tier, such as being applicable only to public repositories.