Resoto CLI 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).

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!)

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.

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.