About CloudBurn
CloudBurn came out of real AWS cleanup work.
CloudBurn is built by Towards the Cloud, our AWS consultancy. We kept seeing the same expensive AWS decisions show up in Terraform, CloudFormation, and live environments, then watched teams discover them too late inside another FinOps dashboard.
So we encoded those patterns into a deterministic rule engine engineers can actually run where the work happens: in CI before deploy, and again against live AWS with discover.
- Built by AWS consultants
- Terraform + CloudFormation
- CI + live AWS
What we learned in the field
AWS waste usually does not come from one dramatic mistake. It comes from repeated patterns that look harmless in code review, then get multiplied across accounts, regions, and teams.
- Before deploy
- Review infrastructure cost risk while the change is still easy to fix, not after it becomes a production cleanup project.
- Deterministic rules
- Every finding comes from an explicit rule the team can inspect, discuss, and roll out deliberately.
- Same engine on AWS
- The checks you trust in CI can be reused with
discoveragainst what is already running in production.
How CloudBurn works
One set of AWS cost rules, run before and after you deploy.
Most cost tools show you a dashboard after the money is spent. CloudBurn gives you rules you can read instead. Run them on your infrastructure code to stop an expensive change before it merges, then run them against your AWS account to find what is already wasting money.
What it changes for your team
Developers see the cost of a change in the pull request, not weeks later on the bill.
Platform teams get checks they can read, tune, and explain, not a score from a black box.
Years of AWS cost reviews become checks that run on every change, not advice in a slide deck.
Readable rules
Every finding traces back to a rule
Each check is a plain rule you can open in the source: what it looks for, the threshold it uses, and what to do about it. The same input gives the same result on every run.
Before deploy
Catch costly changes in the pull request
Run cloudburn scan in CI against Terraform and CloudFormation. A costly pattern gets flagged during code review, while changing it is still a one-line fix instead of a migration.
After deploy
Find the waste that is already running
Run cloudburn discover against your live AWS account. The same rule engine checks deployed resources for idle NAT gateways, unattached EBS volumes, and other spend that does no work.
Start small
Try it on one repo for free
Install the open-source CLI with brew or npm, read the rules, and add it to one pipeline. The output works in the terminal, in CI logs, and as JSON when you want to automate around it.
What comes next
We want cost review to become part of the delivery system, not a separate industry layered on top of it.
CloudBurn starts with the rule engine and CLI because that is the most direct way to give engineers signal. Over time, the product should help teams broaden coverage, tighten rollout controls, and make cost discipline operational across more of AWS without turning into another vague dashboard product.
CloudBurn Platform is coming soon.
Broader rule coverage
Keep expanding the AWS surface so more cost mistakes can be caught before deploy and revisited later in discovery.
Stronger rollout controls
Help teams move from one-repo adoption to organization-wide cost policy without losing clarity around why a rule exists.
Clearer remediation flow
Make live findings easier to prioritize so the same system that blocks future waste also helps clean up what is already burning money.