Resoto CLI Blog Posts

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.

Kubernetes is the de-facto standard for orchestrating containerized applications. It is the go-to solution no matter where your infrastructure is running. Resoto can already collect resources in Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and DigitalOcean, all of which support Kubernetes.

I'm happy to announce that Resoto now supports collecting Kubernetes resources!

Understanding what's running in your cloud infrastructure is important for a number of reasons—for example, security, compliance, and cost.

But sometimes, the cloud feels more like a black box that you're feeding with cash, and in turn it performs the work that makes your business run.

Even those spinning up cloud resources might only be aware of their small slice of the pie. With hundreds of thousands of interconnected resources, it is really hard to know what's going on!

Cloud inventory has become a new type of technical debt, where organizations lose track of their infrastructure and how it relates to the business. Resoto helps to break open the aforementioned black box and eliminate inventory debt.

Resoto uses a directed graph to represent your infrastructure resources as nodes and relationships between them as edges. A load balancer for example is represented as node with edges pointing to all target compute instances. The compute instance might have a volume attached, where we would see an edge between the instance node and the volume node.

Nodes represent resources, while edges define the relationship between nodes. It is often the case that a resource has multiple relationships to other resources.

Resoto has a command-line interface accessible via Resoto Shell. Commands are not executed locally, but interpreted on the server. As such, only Resoto Shell is required client-side.

Resoto offers commands like echo, tail, and jq—old friends to veteran shell users—but these commands only account for a small fraction of the possibilities in Resoto's command-line interface.

Version 2.X of Resoto Shell introduces tab completion, making the command-line interface easier to use than ever before! Press the tab key, and Resoto Shell will present you with a list of available commands: