I’m studying the governance workflow around Terraform changes.
For teams using Terraform in production, when a plan proposes infrastructure changes with a material recurring cost consequence, how is that cost consequence handled before “apply”?
I’m interested in patterns such as:
- IaC cost estimation in PRs,
- policy/approval thresholds,
- budget checks,
- recording assumptions,
- mapping a change back to an approved project/product budget,
- and later comparing forecast cost with actual billing.
Is this normally part of the Terraform workflow, handled separately by FinOps/finance, or largely left to engineering judgement?
If you have an example of a workflow that works particularly well, I’d appreciate the detail.