ACE (Azure Cost Estimator)

Automated cost estimation of your Azure infrastructure made easy. Works with ARM Templates, Bicep and Terraform.

Demo

Philosophy

As adoption of cloud services progresses, understanding how cloud billing works becomes more and more critical for keeping everything under control. Most of the time initial infrastructure cost estimation is done only during design phase and gets neglected as development progresses. Many development teams don't have enough understanding how to calculate impact of their changes and find difficult to get an immediate feedback whether they're still withing acceptable level of money spent for their services.

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) makes things even more difficult - it solves the problem of cloud infrastructure treated as a separate development stream, but doesn't give you control over cost of components under your control.

ACE follows a concept of running cost as architecture fitness function. You can make it an integral part of your CICD pipeline and quickly gather information of how much you're going to spend.

Main features

• Supports 49 Azure services (~92 resource types)
• Native support for Bicep, ARM Templates and Terraform
• Detailed output containing information about cost of your infrastructure and metrics used for calculation
• Seamless integration with ARM Templates and Bicep (with a little help of Bicep CLI)
• Always fresh data thanks to direct calls to Azure Retail API
• Native tool experience - no third-party services / proxies, everything relies on componenets delivered and used by Microsoft
• Multi-option authentication based on Azure.Identity package - project automatically uses cached credentials from the running environment (supports Azure CLI / Environment credentials / Managed Identity and more)
• Allows you to validate your deployment before it happens - if the template you used is invalid, an error with detailed information is returned
• Support for both Incremental / Complete deployment modes (see Usage section)
• Displaying delta describing difference between your current estimated cost and after changes are applied
• An option to stop CICD process if estimations exceed given limit (see Usage section)
• Supports passing parameters along with your template (including .bicepparam files)
• Handles extension resources as long as they're correctly configured (i.e. define scope parameter)
• Works with both individually defined resources and nested resources
• Supports 17 different currencies
• Allows for generating output as an artifact for further processing
• Ability to consume custom usage patterns for enhancing calculations
• Multiple deployment scopes support (resource group / subscription / management group / tenant)

Documentation

Check wiki for detailed information about installation, usage and available features

GitHub Action

ACE comes with a dedicated GitHub Action for your worflows for easy integration. See this repository for more information.

Services support

Services not listed are considered TBD. Below list represents the latest commit available, which isn't always aligned with the most recent release.

Contributions

Contributions are more than welcome!

Acknowledgements

• TOC generator - https://ecotrust-canada.github.io/markdown-toc/
• MVP.css - https://github.com/andybrewer/mvp/