steampipe

Steampipe lets you query your cloud accounts, SaaS tools, and APIs with plain SQL. Want every S3 bucket that's public, or every IAM user without MFA? Write a SELECT statement instead of clicking through consoles or maintaining a pile of scripts. It's open source and runs as a single binary.

It works through plugins, one per service, that map a provider's API to database tables, so AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, GitHub, and hundreds more become queryable. Setup is the binary plus the plugins and credentials you need. For security work, the Powerpipe benchmarks bolt on top and run CIS and compliance checks as pre-written queries. Solo and small teams get all of it for nothing.

Turbot Pipes is the hosted version: a shared cloud instance, saved queries, dashboards, and team access without running your own. Solo and small teams, the CLI is the answer, maybe wired into CI. Larger teams that want a shared query workspace and dashboards, Pipes is the shortcut.

The catch: SQL over live APIs is slower than you expect, and a broad query across a big account can take real time and hit rate limits. It's built for investigation and audits, not for anything that needs sub-second answers.