3 Building a Cloud Asset Inventory

 

This chapter covers

  • Building a comprehensive cloud asset inventory across multiple cloud providers
  • Using native tools for AWS, GCP, and Azure to manage cloud resources
  • Implementing custom scripts for resource discovery and inventory management
  • Leveraging multi-cloud inventory open-source tools like CloudQuery
  • Best practices for maintaining an accurate and up-to-date cloud asset inventory
  • Integrating asset inventory with FinOps practices for cost optimization

In the previous chapters, we explored the foundations of FinOps and its framework. We learned about the importance of visibility and understanding cloud costs. Now, we're going to take a practical step towards achieving that visibility by building a cloud asset inventory.

A cloud asset inventory is a comprehensive list of all the resources your organization is using across its cloud environments. In this chapter, we'll explore various methods to build this inventory, starting with manual scripts and moving on to cloud-native and third-party tools.

We'll focus primarily on AWS, which is the most widely used cloud provider, while keeping examples for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure available in the accompanying GitHub repository for readers who work with those providers.

3.1 Cloud Resources Management

3.1.1 Building an Inventory Using a Bash Script

3.2 Managing Your AWS Inventory

3.2.1 AWS Config

3.2.2 AWS Resources Explorer

3.2.3 AWS Resource Groups

3.3 Building a Multi-Cloud Asset Inventory

3.3.1 CloudQuery

3.4 Summary