Design a Cloud Asset Inventory System
Last updated: December 9, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a system that maintains a complete, real-time inventory of all cloud resources across AWS, Azure, and GCP for thousands of enterprise customers.
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December 9, 20256
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Design a system that maintains a complete, real-time inventory of all cloud resources across AWS, Azure, and GCP for thousands of enterprise customers.
A comprehensive asset inventory is the foundation of cloud security. You cannot protect what you cannot see. The system must discover all resources (compute, storage, network, identity, serverless) across multiple cloud providers and accounts, maintain their current state, and feed the Security Graph with up-to-date resource information.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Design a multi-cloud resource discovery and synchronization system
- Handle the diverse resource types and APIs across cloud providers
- Maintain near real-time accuracy of resource state
- Scale to millions of resources across thousands of tenants
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How do you handle cloud resources that don't emit change events?
- How would you detect shadow IT or unmanaged cloud accounts?
- What is your strategy for handling API schema changes from cloud providers?
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Practice System Design ProblemsSample Answer
Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Resource Discovery: The system should automatically discover cloud resources (compute, storage, network, identity, serverless) across AWS, Azure, and GCP for each en...
Capacity Estimation
For capacity estimation, let's assume:
- Total Tenants: 5,000 enterprise customers.
- Average Resources per Tenant: 1,000 cloud resources across multiple providers.
- Total Resources: 5,00...
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