Resoto offers an open-source approach to use infrastructure data to solve today's most pressing cloud problems: cost, resilience, security, and compliance.
In this post, I share the story of how D2iQ, an enterprise Kubernetes provider, used Resoto to reduce their annual cloud bill by 78% and save $5.4M per year.
In today's cloud-native world, maintaining a resilient and secure infrastructure is crucial to the success of any business. However, as the cloud infrastructure grows in complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult to track all your cloud resources.
This is where Resoto comes in—Resoto ensures that information about your cloud resources is always available by routinely collecting infrastructure data across cloud providers, accounts, regions, and a plethora of services.
However, simply having cloud resource data is not enough; it is also crucial to automate actions based on this data.
For example, if a resource is no longer needed, it should be cleaned up to avoid incurring unnecessary costs. Similarly, if a resource is not properly tagged, it can be difficult to identify its purpose, leading to confusion and making reporting a mess.
Resoto provides tools to cope with such challenges. In this post, we'll explore another category of high-priority issues that often require immediate attention: breaches in the security baseline.
Welcome to my first blog post! I'm Raffa and I'm excited to share a new feature that I've been working on: the job editor in Resoto UI.
The Resoto job editor provides a low-code way to create and manage automated jobs.
Cloud tagging strategies and policies are hailed as one of the most efficient ways to keep your cloud infrastructure controllable. But are they really?
Generally, the idea is that every piece of cloud service gets tagged (or labeled, in case of Google Cloud) by the developers or maintainers who work with it. This could be accomplished with infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools (such as Terraform), with a command-line interface (CLI), or in the cloud UI.
Tagging policies could require that each resource needs tags identifying the owner, cost center, product, project, and/or any other metadata. By being diligent about tagging, resources can be managed via their tags and nothing gets overlooked.
In theory, this is the correct way to manage resources; in practice, however, this hardly ever works as intended.
Each tag created is a tag that requires maintenance. Tagging policies may change over time and people can make mistakes (in AWS, for example, tag keys are case sensitive).
And, to properly use tagging on a greenfield cloud account is one thing; to retroactively apply tags to sprawling cloud infrastructure is quite another (especially when utilizing a multi-cloud strategy, where you'd need to repeat any operation over multiple interfaces).
Kubernetes has dramatically improved the way we manage our workloads. It has become the de-facto standard for deploying and managing containerized applications, and is available in all major cloud providers.
A typical setup consists of distinct Kubernetes clusters for each application stage (e.g., dev, test, prod) or a cluster per tenant, and Kubernetes clusters shared between different users and teams often utilize namespaces and roles to control access. Deploying a single application to a Kubernetes cluster usually consists of tens to hundreds of resources (e.g., deployments, services, ConfigMaps, secrets, ingresses, etc.).
Even a relatively simple setup quickly becomes tedious to manage as the resource count grows. It is difficult for a human to keep track of resources, especially with user access limited to certain clusters in select namespaces.
A cloud asset inventory is a complete representation of the resources in your cloud. The job of the inventory is to continuously discover new resources and store data about each individual resource (such as its properties, configurations, and dependencies). Examples of resources not only include compute instances, storage buckets, Kubernetes pods, but also access keys and user and org policies.
In modern cloud-native environments, developers enjoy freedom and permissions to create new resources. The resources in a company's cloud environment can easily number in the hundreds of thousands or millions, resulting in new challenges for infrastructure engineers. One such problem is "infrastructure fragmentation"—resources are distributed across regions, organizations, accounts, and/or projects, and each resource has unique properties and APIs. Coupled with constant change, this fragmentation makes it difficult to keep track of resources, which opens the door to cost problems, security threats, and compliance issues.
A cloud asset inventory solves the infrastructure fragmentation problem by providing complete visibility into all resources from a single place.