Ask HN: How do you keep an inventory of cloud infrastucture

[buzzdenver]

I have inherited about a dozen AWS accounts to administer, and want to get a lay of the land of what is running on them. Basically looking for a tool where you can set up rules that give a one sentence description of each resource, and is also good at alerting once something new runs. From what I've seen, a significant percentage of EC2 instances are servers that can probably be terminated because their purpose was to run some random tests 2 years ago. I understand that ideally everything would probably be part of a CloudFormation template, but that is not a easy change to do once you already have things running AFAIK.

[yuppie_scum]

I’d recommend Terraform ahead of Cloudformation.

You can import resources into terraform, I’m not sure how much progress they’ve made in exporting configuration to match current state.

It is well worth the effort to get your infra codified. Makes additional changes trivial.