5 posts tagged with "search"

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.

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.

The nodes represent the actual resources. The edges define the relationship between the nodes. It is possible and highly likely, that one resource has multiple relationships to other resources.

Resoto's search allows for resources to be selected using filters, combinators, and traversals. Search results can be combined, grouped, and aggregated.

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?