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by mbautin 2646 days ago
That is an interesting project! The idea of a graphical representation of infrastructure assets, with the ability of querying, sounds very useful, especially given how in AWS Management Console every region is a separate realm and no single view of resources is available. However, I don't agree with equating "infrastructure assets" with AWS -- AWS is the biggest cloud, but almost every business is moving towards multiple clouds / hybrid cloud these days. Similarly to providing a "bird's eye view" of assets in AWS, this concept would be even more useful in a multi-cloud / cross-cloud infrastructure. If this is on the roadmap, it probably deserves a mention in the documentation, and if not, it should be stated that this project focuses on AWS only at this time.
3 comments
jordanbeiber 2646 days ago
Terraform uses a graph to keep track of infrastructure dependencies. You can export the graph and take a look (terraform graph).

I once built a terraform provider for a custom neo4j cmdb to be able to add metadata in the form of additional relationships to anything provisioned with TF.

This data was used for config inventory, job scheduling and a bunch of other automations/rules.

Broke the ”cloud vendor” boundry this way and we used it seamlessly against on-prem vsphere and aws.

Never got around to open source it, unfortunately.

A graph for this type of cmdb/config data is really useful.

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ryan_lane 2646 days ago
For every business actively doing multi-cloud, I'd really love to see their business-case argument for doing so. For the past 8 years or so, I've talked to a large number of businesses that have gone multi-cloud to "avoid vendor lock-in" or to "get the best features of all clouds" who end up regretting their choices because they tend to end up with the worst of all worlds, networking issues, latency problems, tooling woes, and considerably larger tooling teams that are always playing catch-up.
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alexchantavy 2645 days ago
> this concept would be even more useful in a multi-cloud / cross-cloud infrastructure.

Thanks for the comment! Cartography can definitely be extended to do multi-cloud but we're focusing on AWS at the moment. At the same time though we didn't want to discourage others from looking at this by saying in the docs that it was solely an AWS project. There's nothing really stopping it from supporting other data sources.

Edit: we're planning on adding a GitHub module soon too.

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