shift-left

Most FinOps reviews happen weeks after infrastructure ships, when the bill arrives. CDK cost estimation flips that — synthesize the stack, walk the resource graph, hit the AWS Pricing API per resource, and post a monthly-cost diff on every pull request. The cost feedback loop drops from weeks to minutes; the failure modes (request volume, token usage, data transfer) are documented up front.

The standard FinOps loop is monthly: bill arrives, FinOps team flags variance, engineering investigates, fix lands the next sprint. Shift-left collapses that loop to minutes — cost estimation in PRs, per-team budget alarms in Slack, cost ownership tags enforced at IaC time. The result is engineers making cost-aware decisions at design time, not at bill-review time.