bluelabs / arm-estimator

ACE (Azure Cost Estimator) - automated cost estimations for ARM Templates & Bicep

ACE (Azure Cost Estimator)

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

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 47 Azure services (~85 resource types)
• Native support for Bicep & ARM Templates
• 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
• 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

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.

Service	Support level	More information
Active Directory B2C	Not Supported	-
Active Directory Domain Services	Not Supported	-
Advanced Data Security	Not Supported	-
Advanced Threat Protection	Not Supported	-
AKS	In development	Supports only VMSS agent pools
APIM	Stable	-
App Configuration	Stable	-
Application Gateway	Stable	-
Application Insights	In development	Supports classic mode, doesn't support Enteprise Nodes and Multi-step Web Test
Analysis Services	Stable	-
ASR	In progress	Doesn't support recovery to customer-owned sites
Automation Account	Stable	Supports Process Automation only
Azure App Service	In development	Supports Azure App Service Plans (without Isolated tiers) and Azure Functions (Consumption / Premium / App Service Plan)
Azure Firewall	Stable	-
Availability Set	Stable	-
Backup	Stable	-
Bastion	Stable	-
Bot Service	Stable	-
Chaos Studio	Stable	-
Cognitive Search	In development	Doesn't support Document Cracking / Semantic Search / Custom Entity Skills Text Records
Confidential Ledger	Stable	Official pricing will be available September 2022
Container Apps	Stable	-
Container Registry	Stable	-
Cosmos DB	In development	Supports only single-region writes with manual throughput provisioning
Data Factory	In Development	Doesn't support IR and SSIS
Event Hub	Stable	-
Event Grid	Stable	-
Health Bot	Stable	-
Key Vault	Stable	Doesn't support Azure Dedicated HSM
Log Analytics	In development	Estimations doesn't include commitment tiers & logs retention
Logic Apps	In development	Doesn't support ISE scale units
Maria DB	Stable	-
Monitor	In development	Alerts estimations doesn't include frequency / metrics count
Network Interface	Stable	-
Network Security Group	Stable	-
PostgreSQL	Stable	Doesn't include Hyperscale being part of Cosmos DB
Public IP Address	Stable	-
Public IP Address Prefixes	Stable	-
Redis	Stable	-
Sentinel	In development	Estimations doesn't include commitment tiers
Service Bus	Stable	Doesn't support Hybrid Connections and WCF Relay
SignalR	Stable	-
SQL Database	Stable	-
Storage Account	In development	Supports only StorageV2 (without File Service & Data Lake Storage)
Stream Analytics	Stable	Stream Analytics on Edge requires separate estimation
Time Series	Stable	-
Virtual Machine	Stable	Supports Ax, Bx and Dx VM families
VMSS	Stable	Supports the same VM families as Virtual Machines
Virtual Network	Stable	-
VPN Gateway	Stable	-

Contributions

Contributions are more than welcome!

Acknowledgements

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