Mining for cost awareness in the infrastructure as code artifacts of cloud-based applications: An exploratory study

Context:
Cloud computing’s rise as the primary platform for software development and delivery is largely driven by the potential cost savings. However, it is surprising that no empirical evidence has been collected to determine whether cost awareness permeates the development process and how it manifests in practice.

Objective:
This study aims to provide empirical evidence of cost awareness by mining open source repositories of cloud-based applications. The focus is on Infrastructure-as-Code artifacts that automate software (re)deployment on the cloud.

Methods:
A systematic examination of 152 735 repositories yielded 2010 relevant hits. We then analyzed 538 relevant commits and 208 relevant issues using inductive and deductive coding and corroborated findings with discussions from Stack Overflow.

Results:
The findings indicate that developers are not only concerned with the cost of their application deployments but also take actions to reduce these costs beyond selecting cheaper cloud services. We also identify research areas for future consideration.

Conclusion:
Although we focus on a particular Infrastructure-as-Code technology (Terraform), the findings can be applicable to cloud-based application development in general. The provided empirical grounding can serve developers seeking to reduce costs through service selection, resource allocation, deployment optimization, and other techniques.