Multi-Cloud Inventory: Build vs Buy

The inventory problem

Every cloud account has resources: EC2 instances, S3 buckets, RDS databases, load balancers, security groups. Each provider offers its own console and API for listing resources. When you operate across AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes clusters, and on-prem infrastructure, there's no single view. Teams manually piece together inventories from multiple sources, leading to stale data, missed resources, and compliance gaps. The question is whether to build a custom pipeline or buy a hosted solution.

Building your own inventory pipeline

A custom inventory system uses provider SDKs or APIs to discover resources on a schedule, stores them in a database, and presents them through a UI or API. You need to handle authentication per provider, manage rate limits, reconcile resource IDs across accounts, maintain topology relationships, and keep the data fresh. The development effort is significant; each provider requires credential management, pagination handling, and field mapping. Adding on-prem agents introduces additional complexity around agent deployment, communication channels, and data synchronization.

AWS SDK ──▶ resource discovery ──▶ databaseAzure CLI ──▶ resource discovery ──┐GCP API ──▶ resource discovery ────┤On-prem agents ──▶ inventory sync ─┘                              │              unified inventory ──▶ UI/API

Buying a hosted control plane

Hosted control planes like Devopsify provide pre-built connectors for major providers, automatic credential rotation, scheduled discovery, topology mapping, and operational context alongside inventory. The trade-off is vendor lock-in versus development cost. A hosted solution typically charges per account or per resource, but eliminates the engineering overhead of building and maintaining discovery pipelines.