Manipulating Resources

And into this Ring he poured his cruelty, his malice, and his will to dominate all life. One Ring to rule them all.

– Galadriel (Lord of the Rings)

In the previous chapter, we talked about creating resources. We talked about using automation to provision the correct specifications of resources every single time. But what about pre-existing resources?

In some real-world scenarios, you may be expected to work with projects or workloads that you haven’t created from scratch, or that need to be touched with a very fine hand. You may also be working with resources that you have a lot less power over, such as managed resources in your cloud that are managed by your cloud provider.

It’s easy to manipulate the resources that you have made, but these legacy resources and resources that have fewer controls are the challenge for DevOps engineers. Conquering these challenges requires learning how to manipulate resources to make them more...