HashiCorp's integration into IBM took another step forward this month with updated FinOps features for HashiCorp Cloud Platform and Terraform Enterprise.
FinOps, a combination of the terms finance and DevOps, refers to embedding IT cost policies into infrastructure automation systems, and has grown in popularity over the past three years amid global economic volatility. Apptio was among the first of IBM's business units to integrate with HashiCorp with CostGuard, a GitHub app launched prior to the closure of IBM's $6.4 billion acquisition of HashiCorp in February. CostGuard could surface cost information, including recommendations, to Terraform infrastructure-as-code (IaC) users to guide provisioning decisions.
Now, the two companies have revamped that tool into a new product launched this month in public preview and publicized this week during the Technology Business Management conference this week in Miami. Cloudability Governance enforces FinOps policies during IaC deployments and reflects Terraform data in the Cloudability interface.
Eugene Khvostov
"[CostGuard] was not bidirectional. Yes, if you were using Terraform, you could inject your costs from Cloudability," said Eugene Khvostov, chief product officer at IBM Apptio. "Now you can inject your tag mapping, so the context of your teams, your business units, and the policies for those tags and resources."
FinOps policy integration under Cloudability Governance will take two forms: inform mode, which warns users that their infrastructure plans are out of compliance with policies, and enforcement mode, which blocks non-compliant infrastructure deployments, according to the IBM Apptio website.
The integration of FinOps policies into Terraform is achieved through a new run task integration with the HashiCorp Cloud Platform version or Terraform Enterprise. This integration was also previewed at HashiConf in September during a keynote presentation by Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO at HashiCorp.
"You can see feedback from cost estimation, cost policies, cost recommendations, all being surfaced inline as part of a plan / apply cycle," Dadgar said. "It's part of going deeper … with Cloudability to try and shift that FinOps control into the actual path where we're making changes, rather than the classic Whac-a-Mole that we see, where we spin [things] up and [create] a bunch of costs and then FinOps has to come and … clean up afterward."
FinOps buoyed by AI adoption
IBM Apptio, including Cloudability, will also be integrated into HashiCorp's forthcoming Project infragraph, Khvostov said. The knowledge graph project, launched in private beta during HashiConf, will be used to ground agentic AI infrastructure automation. It will incorporate data from other products in the IBM portfolio, such as Red Hat Ansible, Red Hat OpenShift, Turbonomic, Concert, Watsonx Orchestrate and Watsonx, along with major public cloud providers and other third-party tools, according to a HashiCorp blog post.
IT has been under-managed with spreadsheets and gut feel for way too long, when we need quantitative and AI-based predictive capabilities for these decisions, because they are not trivial.
Charles BetzAnalyst, Forrester Research
Deepening data sharing between FinOps and infrastructure automation tools is part of a sorely-needed modernization of enterprise governance that's being spurred by the adoption of AI, according to Charles Betz, an analyst at Forrester Research.
"The emergence of what we're calling at Forrester the ‘intelligent IT management graph’ is enabling new algorithmic [approaches] to manage IT that we've never had before," Betz said in an interview with Informa TechTarget this month. "IT has been under-managed with spreadsheets and gut feel for way too long, when we need quantitative and AI-based predictive capabilities for these decisions, because they are not trivial."
IBM Apptio also addressed growing concerns about the cost of AI infrastructure with version 3.0 of its Kubecost tool for Kubernetes environments, which includes new GPU monitoring and optimization based on integration with Nvidia’s Data Center GPU Manager exporter.
"Cost control over AI is the big question," Betz said. "The whole FinOps community is starting to really look at token costs and how you draw a line of sight from token cost to business value. … Nobody's got a perfect answer."
IBM Apptio's FinOps competitors include Datadog, Flexera, Harness, ServiceNow, Sysdig and VMware Tanzu CloudHealth.
Beth Pariseau, a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism covering DevOps. Have a tip? Email her or reach out @PariseauTT.
Eugene Khvostov
