Get started with Snyk IaC Describe on AWS

Step 1: Configure AWS authentication for your environment

Set up authentication

The snyk iac describe command requires authentication to your cloud provider in order to be run properly. It only requires the lowest read-only access rights possible. A good default to get started is to use the built-in AWS "ReadOnlyAccess" IAM policy for that IAM user.

snyk iac describe can reuse standard authentication methods for AWS, like the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, and AWS_REGION environment variables. When those are set, the Snyk CLI will automatically pick them up to authenticate on AWS.

Another option is to configure the AWS profile in ~/.aws/credentials and use the AWS_PROFILE environment variable.

Step 2: Use describe command to report drift

Drift resource types

Snyk IaC can report two types of drifted resources: managed and unmanaged.

• Unmanaged resources - resources that are actually present on your cloud provider but not on your Terraform state. You probably want to import those resources into Terraform, or delete them from your IaaS account.

• Managed resources - identified resources from your infrastructure that are listed both in your Terraform state and on your cloud provider.

Select Terraform state files

To understand the drift that happens in your cloud environment, compare the state of your environment to one or multiple Terraform state file(s) (.tfstate).

The state file can be located locally or in an S3 bucket (Terraform Cloud is also available, but out of scope for this getting started document).

The --from option helps us to determine the path of the tfstate file.

For a single local Terraform state file use the command:

$ snyk iac describe --from="tfstate://path/to/terraform.tfstate" --only-unmanaged

To automatically load all the Terraform states found in a given directory, you can use glob patterns like this:

$ snyk iac describe --from="tfstate://path/to/**/*.tfstate" --only-unmanaged

For a single Terraform state stored on an S3 backend:

$ snyk iac describe --from="tfstate+s3://my-bucket/path/to/state.tfstate" --only-unmanaged

You can also aggregate multiple Terraform state files by listing them in the --from option. You can scan your local directory for different files, or use different paths from different sources. To choose two specific Terraform states, execute the following:

$ snyk iac describe --from="tfstate://path/to/terraform_S3.tfstate,tfstate://path/to/terraform_VPC.tfstate" --only-unmanaged

Drift results and next steps

Create baseline

You ran snyk iac describe once and got a report of the current IaC coverage of your cloud infrastructure. Once you are done fixing all the issues you identified and are left with known differences you are not planning to change, you can create a baseline so those differences will not be displayed in your next scan.

There are two options: ignore a specific resource or ignore multiple resources.

Ignore multiple resources

Use the output of the describe command and extract its results to update the .snyk excluded policies:

$ snyk iac describe --json --all | snyk iac update-exclude-policy

Ignore a single resource

In order to ignore a specific resource, you need to exclude it manually by editing the .snyk file and adding the resource details to the exclude list. More information can be found here.

You're now ready to add snyk iac describe as a recurring cronjob to get alerts when a new resource is created or modified outside of your IaC deployment!