AWS Blog Posts

Today's world of cloud computing is complex. There are many cloud providers, each with their own set of services. Getting insights out of your infrastructure requires specialized understanding of the data from each service.

Cloud Service Diversity​

Properties in different services may have different names but the same meaning, or vice versa. To interpret properties, we need to ensure that values have a defined unit of measurement and one base unit. You can see the challenge if you imagine the many ways you can specify the size of a volume, the number of CPU cores, or even timestamps.

Retrieving information about resources you have deployed in your Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure means tediously navigating the AWS Management Console or using the AWS Command Line Interface. This approach works well in a single account setup, but best practice is to set up a multi-account environment. And as the number of accounts grows, navigating your infrastructure and finding resources via the Console or the CLI becomes increasingly difficult.

Furthermore, the relationships between your resources are also relevant: an EBS volume is mounted to an EC2 instance running in a VPC and reachable via an ALB load balancer, for example. Developers create resources using tools such as Terraform, CDK, or CloudFormation… or sometimes even the console or CLI. How can you see everything that is running in your cloud?