AWS Blog Posts

A Resoto install comes with batteries included; Resoto ships with a command-line interface (CLI) that allows for exploration, insights, and manipulation of your infrastructure. With Resoto's CLI, automating tedious tasks becomes a breeze. Think about enforcing a policy, cleaning up resources, exporting data, or alerting on specific circumstances. See How-To Guides to learn more about possible use cases.

Version 3 of Resoto introduces the ability to extend this capability by defining custom commands programmatically in the language of your choice. If you are familiar with Python, this task becomes super easy, since all the necessary boilerplate code is already provided.

In this blog post, we will implement a new command called hello-world in Python, to show the power and flexibility of this new feature. The simple idea of our new command is adding a greeting to the tags of a selected resource.

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.

Cloud Resource Tagging Policies​

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.

Cloud Resource Tagging Challenges​

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).

We recently released the Resoto AWS CDK construct, which simplifies the deployment of Resoto to AWS.

The CDK construct pretty simple. All you need is a recent version of Node.js (we tested with 18.x.x) and Git. If you don't already have Node.js installed, we recommend using Node Version Manager (nvm).

In Actionable Cloud Infrastructure Metrics, we explored how to create metrics, export them into a time series database, and visualize them with Grafana. Today, we'll take a look at how to build a web app using Streamlit, a framework that turns data into web apps.

If you are not familiar with Python, don't worry—we're going to keep it simple! In Prerequisites, we'll go over installing Python and the coding techniques utilized in this project.

Software engineers working with AWS have every cloud service imaginable at their fingertips, and developer velocity could hardly be higher. But, even the most shiny of coins has two sides.

While developers can freely spin up compute instances and databases in addition to less tangible things like Lambda functions or virtual identities—at some point, someone will ask, "What is all of this?"

And as that person hacks away in the CLI trying to get an overview of resources spanning multiple AWS accounts, they will inevitably get frustrated.

While Amazon has been a pioneer in cloud computing and offers the largest array of services, there are some things that just aren't so ideal. Namely, API consistency.

In this post, I describe a few of the challenges and quirks with the AWS API and why we're building Resoto. (Spoiler alert: It is so that you don't have to!)