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.

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

Contributions

Contributions are more than welcome!

Acknowledgements

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