CloudBurn

About CloudBurn

CloudBurn is the financial safety net for modern engineering teams, transforming how you manage cloud infrastructure costs. It's designed for developers and platform engineers who use Terraform or AWS CDK and are tired of the monthly shock of an unpredictable AWS bill. The traditional journey is all too familiar: you write code, deploy infrastructure, and only discover the financial impact weeks later when the invoice arrives, long after the architecture is set in stone. By then, fixing it is a costly, high-risk production refactoring project. CloudBurn rewrites this story by shifting cost visibility left, to the very moment of creation. It integrates directly into your GitHub workflow, automatically analyzing every pull request with infrastructure changes. Using real-time AWS pricing data, it generates an instant, line-item cost report that appears directly in the code review conversation. This creates a powerful feedback loop, empowering your team to discuss, understand, and optimize the financial impact of architectural decisions before a single resource is provisioned. It turns reactive cost optimization into proactive financial governance, ensuring that cost efficiency is baked into your infrastructure from the very first commit.

Features of CloudBurn

Automated Pull Request Cost Analysis

CloudBurn seamlessly integrates with your existing GitHub workflow to provide automatic financial oversight. Every time a developer opens a pull request containing Terraform or AWS CDK changes, CloudBurn springs into action. It captures the infrastructure diff, processes it against live AWS pricing APIs, and posts a detailed cost estimate as a comment on the PR. This happens without any manual intervention, creating a consistent and mandatory checkpoint for cost awareness right where engineering decisions are made and reviewed.

Real-Time, Resource-Level Cost Breakdown

The tool goes beyond a simple total. Its reports provide a granular, resource-by-resource breakdown, comparing the current running cost against the proposed new monthly cost. You see exactly which EC2 instance type change adds $100 or which new RDS cluster configuration is the primary cost driver. Each line item includes the specific AWS usage type, region, and hourly rate, providing complete transparency and eliminating guesswork about where your cloud budget is being allocated.

Pre-Deployment Cost Prevention

This is the core superpower of CloudBurn: preventing expensive mistakes from ever reaching production. By surfacing cost data during code review, it empowers teams to catch misconfigurations—like accidentally selecting an xlarge instance instead of a large one—while the change is still just lines of code. Developers can immediately adjust their Terraform modules or CDK constructs, fostering a culture of cost-conscious engineering and stopping budget surprises at the source.

Seamless Integration with IaC Tools

CloudBurn is built for the tools you already use. It offers dedicated, easy-to-install GitHub Actions for both AWS CDK (the CDK Diff PR Commenter) and Terraform (the Terraform Plan PR Commenter). These actions fit directly into your CI/CD pipelines, capturing the standard output from cdk diff or terraform plan and sending it securely to CloudBurn for analysis. There’s no need for complex new workflows or extensive configuration.

Use Cases of CloudBurn

Preventing Costly Developer Mistakes

A developer on your team is tasked with adding a new caching layer. In a hurry, they copy an existing configuration but forget to change the instance type from r5.24xlarge to something more appropriate. Without CloudBurn, this $5,000-per-month mistake would deploy silently. With CloudBurn, a glaring red flag appears in the PR comment, showing a +$5,000 monthly impact. The reviewer spots it immediately, and the developer fixes the type with a simple commit, saving the company from a significant financial leak.

Enabling Informed Architectural Decisions

Your team is debating two different database solutions for a new microservice: Amazon RDS vs. DynamoDB. Instead of relying on back-of-the-napkin math or outdated spreadsheets, each approach is implemented in a separate feature branch. CloudBurn provides precise, comparable monthly cost estimates for each PR. This data-driven insight allows the team to weigh performance needs against financial impact clearly, leading to a more optimal and cost-aware architectural choice.

Governing Team-Wide Infrastructure Standards

As an engineering lead or FinOps practitioner, you need to ensure teams adhere to cost guidelines, like using Graviton processors or specific instance families. Manually reviewing every PR is impossible. CloudBurn automates this governance. You can quickly scan the cost report in each PR to verify compliance. A sudden spike in cost for a non-compliant resource stands out, allowing for corrective guidance during review, thus scaling cost governance effectively across many teams.

Streamlining Infrastructure Refactoring

You’ve identified an old, expensive set of EC2 instances that need to be migrated to a modern, cost-effective containerized setup on Fargate. The refactoring PR involves complex changes. CloudBurn provides the team with immediate confidence by showing the projected monthly savings directly in the PR. This validates the business case for the refactoring effort in real-time and ensures the new implementation actually delivers the expected financial benefit before you commit to the migration.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does CloudBurn calculate the cost estimates?

CloudBurn uses the official, real-time AWS Pricing API. When it analyzes your Terraform plan or CDK diff output, it identifies each AWS service, resource type, region, and configuration detail. It then queries the live pricing data for those specific parameters to calculate the estimated monthly cost based on 730 hours of usage (24/7 operation). This ensures estimates reflect the most current prices, including any recent changes from AWS.

Is my infrastructure code or AWS pricing data stored by CloudBurn?

Security and privacy are paramount. CloudBurn is designed with a minimal data footprint. It processes the diff output sent by the GitHub Action transiently to generate the cost report. It does not store your actual Terraform or CDK source code. It only queries public AWS pricing data based on the resource specifications in your diff. All billing and permissions are handled securely through GitHub, so you maintain full control.

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

The monthly cost estimate provided in the pull request is based on the standard list price for 730 hours of continuous operation, which serves as a consistent baseline for comparison. It is designed to show the maximum potential cost and highlight the relative impact of changes. For resources with scheduled on/off times, you can use the estimate as a starting point and factor in your specific usage patterns during the team's code review discussion.

Can CloudBurn analyze costs for existing, already-deployed infrastructure?

CloudBurn is specifically focused on pre-deployment analysis for changes. Its primary value is in the pull request workflow, analyzing the delta between what's running and what's proposed. For comprehensive cost management of already-running resources, you would use tools like the AWS Cost Explorer. CloudBurn complements these by preventing new cost issues from being added to your existing bill.