Building a Production-Grade CI/CD Pipeline — Part 3: Adding Cloud Cost Optimization

This tutorial extends a production-grade CI/CD pipeline by adding infrastructure cost visibility directly into the pull request workflow. Using Terraform, Infracost, GitHub Actions, and Slack alerts, the article demonstrates how to estimate cloud cost deltas, enforce budget thresholds, create override workflows, and turn cloud spending into a first-class engineering concern rather than a delayed finance problem.