The open-source service IaSQL recently announced its beta release. Designed to manage cloud infrastructure using SQL, IaSQL introduced support for AWS multi-region, new AWS services, and infrastructure changes as transactions.
Released as open-source software last year, IaSQL manages cloud infrastructure in a PostgreSQL database. The service treats infrastructure as data and maintains a two-way connection between the AWS account and the local database.
As part of the beta release, IaSQL added transactions, supporting batch and stage changes: the iasql_begin and iasql_commit methods allow developers to perform changes to an AWS deployment synchronously, by temporarily disabling the normal propagation between the cloud and the infrastructure database.
It is now possible to run IaSQL on multiple AWS regions, with the default region defined when connecting the database to the account, and locally, running the docker container available on Dockerhub.
docker run -p 9876:9876 -p 5432:5432 --name iasql iasql/iasql
Furthermore, IaSQL increased coverage for EC2, CodeDeploy, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, SNS, ACM, Route53 and other AWS services. Mapping cloud APIs to SQL tables, the service now provides modules with the goal to simplify the deployment of common use cases. LuisFer De Pombo, Co-Founder and CEO of IaSQL, writes:
For instance, deploying a docker container to ECS and exposing it to the internet which is not just ECS but involves ECR, ECS, ACM, and Route53. These simplified modules are written in pure SQL on top of the existing IaSQL modules and are meant to abstract the complexity of coordinating multiple AWS services.
In the article "Deploying to ECS, Simplified!", Mohammad Teimori Pabandi highlights how modules still allow low-level access to resources:
What if you still need the level of control you had when you were doing all the steps manually? The traditional PaaS trade-off is that you can't grow your app beyond the built-in limitations as you don't have access to all the small details. The IaSQL approach is not limited in that way (...) you still have full control over all resources in the deepest details.
While some developers question the benefits of SQL over YAML-based traditional tools, user thythr writes on Reddit:
I feel a pleasant warmth in my soul when I get to use Postgres to do job X, no matter what X is. The more, the better!
IaSQL is not the only open-source project promoting SQL as a language for cloud infrastructure, with Steampipe providing open-source CLI to query cloud APIs.
IaSQL is available on GitHub under an AGPL-3.0 license and as a hosted SaaS solution with a free tier available. AWS is currently the only cloud provider supported, with partial coverage for approximately 25 services.