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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.

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.