AWS
Best Practices
Cloud Infrastructure
What Is a Cloud Asset Inventory? (and Why It Matters)
TL;DR
A cloud asset inventory is a centralized database of all your cloud resources—compute, storage, networking, security configurations, and metadata—collected from AWS APIs and stored in queryable formats. Effective inventories deliver four core capabilities: discovery and collection, relationship mapping, change tracking, and querying/analysis. They're foundational for security governance, cost optimization, and operational excellence at scale.
You probably have 847 different AWS resources running across six accounts right now. Or maybe it's 1,200 resources across nine accounts.
The scary part? You probably can't tell me if those numbers are right or wrong.
If you've been building cloud infrastructure in AWS for any amount of time—spinning up EC2 instances, creating S3 buckets, deploying RDS databases, launching prototype projects—you've likely lost track of at least a few resources along the way.
That engineer who spun up a test environment six months ago and forgot to tear it down? The RDS database from that abandoned prototype still running in us-west-2? The S3 buckets created for one-time data migrations? They're all still there, consuming resources and costing money.
In this foundational video, AWS Partner Solutions Architect Keegan Marazzi and CloudQuery Developer Advocate Joe Karlsson break down what cloud assets are, what cloud asset inventories do, and why they're essential for managing modern cloud infrastructure.
What Is a Cloud Asset? #
Formal definition: Cloud infrastructure resources including compute, storage, networking, security, and everything from networking configurations to VPC setups.
Practical definition: Every component and configuration that keeps your application running—whether it's an engineer's test account or a production environment serving customers.
Cloud assets include:
- Compute resources: EC2 instances, Lambda functions, ECS containers, Fargate tasks
- Storage resources: S3 buckets, EBS volumes, EFS file systems, RDS databases
- Networking resources: VPCs, security groups, network ACLs, load balancers, CloudFront distributions
- Security resources: IAM roles, policies, KMS keys, certificates, secrets
- Configuration and metadata: Tags, launch times, ownership information, relationships between resources
Think of cloud assets as everything that shows up in your AWS bill—and all the configuration that determines how those resources behave, connect, and cost.
What Is a Cloud Asset Inventory? #
A cloud asset inventory is a centralized database of all your cloud assets, bringing together resources from across accounts, regions, and services into one queryable system.
How Cloud Asset Inventories Are Built #
Cloud asset inventories systematically collect data from AWS APIs and transform it into accessible formats:
- Call AWS APIs for each service (EC2's
DescribeInstances, S3'sListBuckets, etc.) - Extract configuration data for all resources, including metadata, tags, and settings
- Map relationships between resources (which security groups protect which instances, which IAM roles can access which resources)
- Store in queryable formats (databases, data warehouses, data lakes) that enable analysis
AWS provides extensive APIs out of the box:
- EC2's
DescribeInstancesfor compute resources - S3's
ListBucketsfor storage - IAM's
ListRolesfor security permissions - 240+ services with comprehensive API coverage
These APIs expose detailed configuration data about your entire AWS cloud. However, calling these APIs yourself is confounding and complex—each service uses different authentication methods, pagination strategies, rate limits, and data formats. Your inventory systematically calls these endpoints, handles all the complexity, extracts resource details, and makes everything queryable in one place.
Why You Need a Cloud Asset Inventory #
After working with companies struggling to scale cloud infrastructure, three strategic reasons consistently emerge—aligned with the AWS Well-Architected Framework—for why organizations need cloud asset inventories.
1. Security: Secure by Design #
AWS principle: Secure by design. Without comprehensive inventory, you can't effectively implement security controls or detect misconfigurations.
What you can't see, you can't secure:
- Can't identify public S3 buckets without knowing all S3 buckets exist
- Can't detect overly permissive security groups without visibility into all security groups
- Can't find unencrypted databases without comprehensive database inventory
- Can't remediate vulnerabilities affecting specific resource types without knowing where they exist
Security use cases inventories enable:
- Identify all publicly accessible resources
- Find unencrypted data stores
- Detect IAM permission sprawl
- Map network connectivity and exposure
- Audit compliance with security policies
- Respond to vulnerability disclosures by identifying affected resources in minutes, not days
Without clear visibility into all your assets, security becomes reactive guesswork instead of proactive governance.
2. Cost Optimization: Eliminate Waste #
AWS Well-Architected pillar: Cost optimization. Visibility into resource utilization identifies idle resources and underutilized capacity.
What you can't see, you can't optimize:
- Unattached EBS volumes costing storage fees
- Idle RDS instances running 24/7 for occasional use
- Unassociated Elastic IPs (charged when not attached)
- Over-provisioned EC2 instances running at 5% CPU
- Forgotten test environments left running
- Reserved capacity purchased but unused
Cost optimization use cases:
- Identify unused resources to decommission
- Right-size over-provisioned infrastructure
- Find zombie resources from abandoned projects
- Track cost allocation by team, project, or environment through tag analysis
- Forecast spending based on current resource utilization
By having a complete view of all your assets, you can optimize spending you didn't even know existed.
3. Operational Excellence: Adapt to Change #
AWS Well-Architected pillar: Operational excellence. Maintaining accurate inventory is key to adapting to change and future-proofing infrastructure.
What accurate inventory enables:
- Incident response: When something breaks at 2 a.m., know what changed and when
- Capacity planning: Understand current resource usage to forecast future needs
- Dependency mapping: Identify which resources depend on others for safe decommissioning
- Change management: Track infrastructure evolution over time
- Disaster recovery: Document complete infrastructure state for business continuity planning
- Compliance auditing: Demonstrate governance and policy adherence
Without good understanding of assets in your environment, adapting to change means stumbling in the dark instead of executing with confidence.
The Four Core Pillars of Effective Cloud Asset Inventories #
After analyzing hundreds of cloud environments—from small startups to massive enterprises—four capabilities consistently separate effective cloud asset inventories from failed implementations.
Pillar 1: Discovery and Collection #
This is your data ingestion engine. Everything falls apart without good data discovery.
What discovery and collection requires:
- API configurations that send data from all AWS services to your inventory
- Coverage across all services (not just EC2 and S3—all 240+ AWS services)
- Multi-account and multi-region support to capture your entire footprint
- Automated discovery of new services as AWS releases them
- Comprehensive metadata extraction including tags, configurations, and relationships
Quality discovery means no assets get left behind. If you're only tracking 60% of your infrastructure, the other 40% is where your security vulnerabilities, cost waste, and operational risks hide.
Pillar 2: Relationship Mapping #
This is where it gets interesting. Relationships between resources reveal dependencies, security boundaries, and operational patterns.
What relationship mapping captures:
- Security groups mapped to EC2 instances they protect
- VPC connectivity through transit gateways and peering connections
- IAM permission boundaries showing what roles can access which resources
- Code-to-infrastructure relationships correlating GitHub/GitLab repositories with deployed resources
- Network topology showing which resources communicate with each other
Why this matters: Your cloud asset inventory becomes the central nervous system connecting cloud resources to your entire operational context.
When you understand not just what exists but how everything connects, you can:
- Safely decommission resources without breaking dependencies
- Trace security exposure paths
- Understand blast radius for potential failures
- Map compliance boundaries
Pillar 3: Change Tracking #
When something breaks at 2 a.m., you need to know what changed and when.
What change tracking provides:
- Audit trail of when changes were made
- Attribution showing who made changes
- Historical state for comparison and rollback planning
- Pattern identification in utilization and access trends
- Integration with logging (CloudWatch, CloudTrail) for complete operational context
Why this matters: Without change tracking, troubleshooting becomes archaeological guesswork. With it, you can correlate infrastructure changes with application issues, security events, and performance degradation.
Pillar 4: Querying and Analysis #
Data without queryability is useless.
You could spend months building comprehensive inventories that sync every AWS resource, capture all metadata, and map every relationship. But if teams can't ask questions and get answers fast, the entire investment is wasted.
Example scenario: Your security team discovers a vulnerability affecting a specific Lambda runtime. If you can't quickly identify all affected functions across all accounts, your inventory has failed.
What queryability requires:
- Ad-hoc query capabilities for exploration and investigation
- Standardized query languages (SQL) that teams already know
- API access for programmatic integration and automation
- Pre-built queries for common questions (show me all untagged resources, find all public S3 buckets)
- Integration with BI tools for visualization and reporting
Critical questions your inventory should answer in seconds:
- Show me all untagged resources in production accounts
- Find all databases without encryption at rest
- List EC2 instances with public IPs
- Identify resources owned by specific teams
- Calculate cost by environment (production vs staging vs development)
If you can't ask common questions like these and get instant answers, your inventory tool is monitoring infrastructure—not enabling operational intelligence.
Putting It All Together #
Cloud assets encompass everything in your entire AWS infrastructure—compute, storage, networking, security, plus all the metadata, tags, and configuration that define how resources behave.
Cloud asset inventories are complete catalogs of all those resources across your environment, unified in one queryable system.
Four core pillars determine whether your inventory succeeds or fails:
- Discovery and collection - See everything
- Relationship mapping - Understand how everything connects
- Change tracking - Know what changed and when
- Querying and analysis - Get answers to critical questions in seconds
Cloud asset inventories are foundational to everything else you need to do in the cloud. They enable security governance, cost optimization, compliance automation, and operational excellence.
Without comprehensive visibility, you're managing infrastructure blindly—reacting to incidents instead of preventing them, wasting money on resources you don't know exist, and failing compliance requirements you can't track.
Ready to build your cloud asset inventory? Continue with our guides on design principles for effective inventories, maximizing value from cloud visibility, and getting started with CloudQuery.
Video Transcript #
Keegan: Hi, everyone. I'm Keegan Marazzi, a partner solutions architect at AWS, where my job is to discover, develop and deliver solutions with our partners. Today I'm joined here with Joe Carlson. He's a senior cloud developer advocate at Cloud Query. Say hi, Joe.
Joe: Hi. By the way, that is a lot of clouds all at once. My job is basically just helping people get visibility into their AWS environments.
Keegan: Awesome. So today we're going to be talking about the fundamentals of cloud asset inventories. why you might need one and what makes a great cloud outside inventory. So Joe, take us away with our current scenario.
Joe: Yeah. So Keegan, I know that you have your AWS environment right now and you probably have like 847 different resources running across six different accounts. And I know this for a fact, because I just made all those numbers up. But the scary part is Keegan, you probably couldn't tell me if I'm right or if I'm wrong. And if you've been building out cloud infrastructure in AWS for any amount of time, spinning up brand new EC2 instances, creating new S3 buckets or decommissioning them or someone set up a new prototype project and forgot to spin down the RDS database somewhere along the way there, you may have lost track of a few of the resources that you actually have.
Keegan: So the first question we should be asking is what is a cloud asset? And as you see on the top left, our formal definition is infrastructure that contains resources like compute, storage, networking, security, and everything else from networking configurations to different VPC configurations, it really can depend on every different account and you can think of it as every setup or every part of your infrastructure that keeps your application running. So whether it's an engineer's test account or whether it's a production account that's actually running the application, All of these are components that come together which consist of cloud assets. Joe, with all these different types of assets, how do we organize and structure them in a way that's actually productive for use?
Joe: Yeah. Well, there's lots of different components of what we consider to be an asset. But an inventory is just a collection of all those different resources to centralize databases of all of your cloud assets that you're managing all in one place. And cloud-ass inventories are built by collecting data from AWS APIs and then storing that in some sort of database or some sort of format that can make that accessible to other people or other systems. AWS actually provides a ton of APIs for services out of the box. So EC2s describe instances or S3s list buckets. These APIs expose detailed configuration data about your AWS cloud. Your inventory If you're building one out is made up of systemically, you know, making calls out to these API endpoints, extracting that data for all those resources and all that metadata, doing some mapping on those metadata resources so they're mapped correctly, so the right metadata and the right tags are on the right resource, and then pulling them together in a queryable format. So, yeah, let's talk a little bit about why you may need a cloud asset inventory.
Keegan: Yeah, so I've worked with companies that struggle with scaling their cloud asset inventories. And as a solutions architect, I think there's three main structural reasons that align with the AWS well architected framework that identify why you should make one. So the first is going to be security, right? At AWS, we have a saying called secure by design. And without a comprehensive inventory, you can't effectively implement good security controls or detect misconfigurations. If you don't have a clear view of all of your assets, the second is going to be cost optimization. Similar to the security pillar, visibility into your resource utilization will help you identify when you're not using idling resources or when you're under utilizing other users. other resources. So by having a clear, well rounded view of all your assets, you're able to optimize on costs that you can use better or you don't need at all. And finally is operational excellence. So maintaining an accurate inventory is key to adapting to change and also being future proof, which we'll talk about in a little bit, but being able to change and having a good understanding of the assets in your environment will help you adapt to changes. So This leaves me with a question. Given that we have these structures and we have these benefits of a cloud asset inventory, can you explain a little bit what the capabilities are of a good cloud asset inventory?
Joe: Yeah, I think it can be broken down into four main pillars that every effective cloud asset inventory has. And we know this from analyzing hundreds of different environments ranging from small all the way up to massive. And here's what we think works at scale. There's four key pillars, and we're going to break these down. But the four pillars are discovery and collection, relationship mapping, change tracking, and querying, and analysis. So let's start with the first pillar, Keegan.
Keegan: Awesome. So this is your data ingestion engine. Everything falls apart if you don't have good data discovery. So this comes from making sure that all your API configurations are sending data to your inventory. Making sure that they're organized and that you're able to capture new services if they become available. Just making sure that you have a good track of all the different resources that are there and that no specific assets are left out. As we mentioned before, making sure that all your cloud assets are in your inventory is key to make sure you're able to make the most of it. That's perfect. Well said.
Joe: Pillar two, relationship mapping. And this is where I personally think it gets interesting, but this is where you're mapping different metadata to the resources, right? You want to map your security groups to your EC2, get those relationships, track VPC connectivity paths through transit gateway architectures, and maybe even understand IM permission boundaries. What do they have access in? Do you have a holistic view of that perimeter? You might also need to correlate things like your GitHub or GitLab repositories and code changes with your EC2 instances. What code changes led to your EC2 instances spinning up or terminating prematurely? I don't know, but your cloud config data has that, especially when you can combine that with your code. Your asset inventory at that time can become the central nervous system, connecting your cloud resources to your entire operations.
Keegan: Awesome. Awesome. So that brings us to our third pillar, which is called change tracking. So when something breaks at 2 a.m., you need to know what changed and when it happened. Your asset inventory must be able to contain a clear audit trail of when changes are made within your AWS accounts and who made them. So you're able to remediate when needed. So For the change tracking pillar, you must be able to identify different patterns, whether that's utilization patterns or whether that's accessing patterns. You're always going to need to connect with the different services like Amazon CloudWatch that provides logs for your services in order to maintain relevancy with your AWS accounts and the overall health of your environment. So that takes us to the fourth pillar.
Joe: Queering and analysis. So you may spend months bringing together all these different cloud configuration details and metadata onto one database. But it's like your security team comes to you and they discover a new vulnerability in a Lambda build. And if you can't quickly identify all the affected functions across all of your accounts, then it's useless. If you can't identify zombie architecture that you're paying for but not using, that's a problem, right? The goal should be able to construct a system that is easy to access that data, analyze it, and actually get value from that. Without a way for people to be able to ask common questions like, show me all my untagged resources on my AWS environment, your inventory tool is just going to be there for monitoring and not going to be a part of a core part of operational intelligence for building and scaling out your AWS environment. Great, we got through a lot there. But let's do a quick recap. So remember, cloud assets encompass everything within your entire AWS infrastructure. That includes your compute, storage, network security and everything else like metadata, tag data, etc. And your cloud asset inventory is a complete catalog of all those resources across your environment, all in one place that is easy to query and analyze it. We've also covered four core pillars of What makes a great cloud-ass inventory? Those are discovery and collection, relationship mapping, change tracking, and querying and analysis. It's all about leveraging the knowledge you can get inside of your cloud-ass inventory to build faster, safer, and more scalable apps on AWS. A cloud-ass inventory is foundational to everything else you need to do in the cloud. So in our next video, we're going to be walking through design considerations you should take when you're building a cloud asset inventory for AWS. Some of the architectural decisions, some of the services you may use, and implementation patterns that we find actually work in production.
Keegan: Awesome. Thanks so much, Joe, for coming on and telling us about cloud asset inventory.
FAQ #
Q: What's the difference between a cloud asset inventory and a CMDB?
A: CMDBs (Configuration Management Databases) traditionally focus on intended state, change control workflows, and manual configuration tracking. Cloud asset inventories focus on actual running resources, real-time synchronization, and automated discovery. Cloud inventories excel at discovering what's actually deployed (including shadow IT), while CMDBs traditionally track what should be deployed according to change management processes.
Q: How is a cloud asset inventory different from AWS Config?
A: AWS Config is an AWS-native service focused on compliance monitoring, configuration change tracking, and rule evaluation for AWS resources. Cloud asset inventories provide broader capabilities—multi-cloud support, custom SQL queries, flexible data models, integration with external platforms, and multiple storage destinations. Many organizations use AWS Config as one data source feeding into broader cloud asset inventory systems.
Q: Do I need a cloud asset inventory if I only have one AWS account?
A: Even single-account environments benefit from centralized inventory, especially as resource counts grow. Inventories enable security monitoring, cost optimization, compliance tracking, and operational intelligence regardless of account structure. Most organizations that start with one account eventually expand—building inventory practices early prevents visibility problems later.
Q: Can cloud asset inventories track resources outside AWS?
A: Yes. Modern cloud asset inventory platforms support multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud) plus SaaS platforms (GitHub, GitLab, Datadog, Okta, etc.). This enables unified visibility across your entire technology stack, not just AWS resources.
Q: How often should asset inventory data be updated?
A: Depends on use cases. Security and compliance often require real-time or sub-five-minute updates. Cost optimization can work with daily syncs. Start with hourly updates as a baseline, then adjust based on stakeholder needs and operational requirements.
Q: What teams typically use cloud asset inventories?
A: Security teams (threat detection, compliance), FinOps teams (cost optimization), platform engineering (infrastructure management), compliance teams (audit preparation), application teams (dependency mapping), and executives (governance visibility). Effective inventories serve cross-functional stakeholders, not just one team.
Q: How much does it cost to build a cloud asset inventory?
A: Costs vary dramatically based on approach. Managed services like AWS Config or CloudQuery provide predictable pricing based on resources tracked. Building custom solutions requires significant engineering time—often 1-3 engineers for months, plus ongoing maintenance. Most organizations find managed solutions more cost-effective than dedicating engineering resources to building inventory systems.
Q: Can cloud asset inventories help with compliance (SOC2, PCI, HIPAA)?
A: Absolutely. Inventories provide the foundation for compliance monitoring—identifying resources subject to compliance requirements, tracking configuration against policies, demonstrating controls for audits, and automating evidence collection. Many compliance frameworks require asset inventory as a foundational control.
Q: What's the biggest mistake organizations make with cloud asset inventories?
A: Building comprehensive data collection without clear use cases. Organizations sync every possible resource, build elaborate schemas, create complex pipelines—then wonder why no one uses the inventory. Start with specific problems (security compliance, cost waste, operational visibility), solve those well, demonstrate value, then expand scope.
Q: How do cloud asset inventories handle ephemeral infrastructure?
A: Modern inventories sync frequently enough to capture even short-lived resources. Change tracking records when resources are created and terminated, even if they only exist for minutes. This is especially important for auto-scaling infrastructure, serverless functions, and container environments where resources constantly appear and disappear.
