Streampipe.com

Streampipe is an open-source tool developed by Turbot, first introduced in early 2021, designed to streamline how developers, operations engineers, and security teams interact with cloud services. The company, based in New York City, was founded in 2020. It operates on a foundational principle of querying cloud infrastructure and APIs using standard SQL syntax, effectively eliminating the need for extract, transform, load (ETL) processes.

The core of the business revolves around providing a command-line interface (CLI) that presents cloud resources—from various providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP—as relational database tables. This is accomplished by leveraging PostgreSQL's Foreign Data Wrapper (FDW) technology, which translates SQL queries into real-time API calls to the respective cloud services. This approach allows users to query live configuration data, such as IAM policies, security groups, and storage buckets, without moving the data or requiring a separate database.

Streampipe's business model is centered on its open-source nature, fostering a community that contributes to a growing library of plugins. While the primary CLI tool is free, the company offers a hosted cloud version called Turbot Pipes, which provides additional features like hosted databases, shared dashboards, and multi-user support, likely forming a key part of its monetization strategy. The tool serves a wide range of clients, from individual developers to large organizations, who need to manage, monitor, and secure their cloud environments. By providing a unified interface across multiple clouds and services, it solves the common problem of context-switching between different tools and simplifies infrastructure management.

The product's main benefit is its ability to make disparate APIs and services queryable through the familiar language of SQL. It supports over 140 plugins for various IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services, including Kubernetes, GitHub, and Slack. This allows users to perform complex queries, join data across different services, and build security and compliance benchmarks. The tool can be run locally, in CI/CD pipelines, or as a centralized service, offering flexibility in deployment. For developers, Streampipe offers an interactive shell with features like auto-complete and command history to simplify the query writing process.

Keywords: cloud security, infrastructure as code, SQL interface, API query tool, multi-cloud management, open source, DevOps, compliance monitoring, asset inventory, PostgreSQL FDW