Title: "Steampipe: The Swiss army knife for platform engineers"
Platform engineers need a flexible, scalable, and efficient way to query cloud APIS and extract actionable insights from the data. Steampipe, an open-source SQL-oriented tool, is becoming their Swiss army knife.
The AWS pros at CMD Solutions Australia use Steampipe to query CrowdStrike for vulnerabilities, then join results with Salesforce data to map from a vulnerability to a device to a person. They've also built custom benchmarks to validate that organizational email domains are configured for DMARC, and to check for inactive Okta accounts.
Claranet France, a managed IT services firm, used Steampipe to revamp their in-house CMDB. The pre-existing Python scripts ran slowly, and it was hard to align results to a common format. Steampipe's highly-concurrent architecture sped up data acquisition, and its use of SQL to unify APIs enabled them to reason over the data in a common way.
Claranet France are also tapping into Steampipe's deep catalog of compliance benchmarks for CIS, GDPR, HIPAA, NIST 800-53, PCI, SOC2, and more. They run the CIS v1.5.0 benchmark for AWS, and are planning to create their own custom benchmarks that reuse and remix existing ones.
To keep costs under control, platform engineers use dashboards like AWS Thrifty to identify underutilized or unused resources. And for an overview of deployed resources, they use dashboards like Kubernetes Insights to visualize resources by means of infocards, tables, charts, and relationship graphs.
The queries and controls that power these benchmarks and dashboards are all open source, available for reuse and remixing. Steampipe integrates into any cloud shell or CI/CD pipeline, and is compatible with any programming language or BI tool.
To get started, download Steampipe, install the plugins you need, then explore benchmarks and dashboards. You can also sign up for the free preview of cloud.steampipe.io for a team experience with centralized credentials, shared benchmarks and dashboards, plus scheduled queries or snapshots that notify Slack or MS Teams. Join our Slack community to interact with fellow Steampipers, who are always eager to answer questions and discuss use cases.