• OpenCost is an open-source tool designed to measure the granular cost of cloud resources.
• It is best suited for cloud-native environments, but works across several cloud platforms.
• While everyone knows the basics of cost optimization, few apply them proactively—they’re usually implemented in retrospect.
• The primary reason for this reactive approach:
• Lack of situational awareness
• Insufficient insight into granular resource costs
• Engineers can estimate total costs for compute instances and infrastructure stacks, but struggle with:
• What does a build cost?
• What does a deploy cost?
• With the rise of AI workloads, costs are escalating.
• More responsibility falls on SRE teams to estimate costs accurately and provide better cost visibility.

Ram Iyengar is an engineer by practice and an educator at heart. He was (cf) pushed into technology evangelism along his journey as a developer and hasn’t looked back since! He enjoys helping engineering teams around the world discover new and creative ways to work. He is a proponent of product development and engineering teams that put the community first.