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formae continuously scans your cloud targets for resources it doesn’t manage yet, so you can adopt it gradually instead of migrating everything at once. Discovery is enabled by default. As soon as you apply a discoverable target, formae starts scanning it every 10 minutes.

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What discovery does

Every resource discovery finds that formae doesn’t already manage is recorded as unmanaged. So formae can coexist with other tools without forcing a rapid migration, an unmanaged resource is read-only: you can see it, but formae won’t change it until you bring it under management. Find what discovery has turned up in your inventory:
To bring discovered resources under management (extract them into a forma, give them a stack, and apply), see Bring existing resources under management.

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Controlling what gets scanned

Targets are discoverable by default. Set discoverable = false on any target you want excluded from discovery. That field lives on the target, so see Target → Discovery for the config, and Configuration for discovery settings like the scan interval.

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How discovered resources are labeled

Every discovered resource needs a label. formae derives it from the resource’s own properties, using the plugin’s default rule (the AWS plugin reads the Name tag), and falls back to the provider identifier when nothing matches. See Label → Labels for discovered resources for the full resolution order, how to override it, and how duplicate labels are disambiguated.

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Coexisting with other tools

A resource formae discovers can still be managed by another tool at the same time. Synchronization keeps formae’s view of these resources up to date, so drift shows up rather than silently diverging.

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See also

  • Synchronization: how formae keeps resources it already knows about current.
  • Target: where discovery scans run, and how to mark a target discoverable.
  • Label: full labeling and collision rules.
  • Resources: managed versus unmanaged resources.