Top all-time · #2371
Steampipe
Company blog · steampipe.io/blogprogrammingdata
Steampipe is the company blog at steampipe.io, writing about programming and data. Since 2021, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 118 times, most often “Select * from cloud”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-04-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (25) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters mostly name steampipe.io as a tool for querying cloud, SaaS and code APIs with SQL, and link it as a reference. Few comments judge the site's writing directly.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 25 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Instantly query your cloud, code, logs & more with SQL. Build on thousands of open-source benchmarks & dashboards for security & insights.
Most-linked posts?
- Select * from cloud13 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2021-02-26
- /6 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2021-02-09
- Dashboards as Code with HCL and SQL2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-03-11
- /docs/cloud/overview2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-09-30
- Shift Left Join Security: Threat Hunting AWS IPs with Shodan and SQL2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-05
What Hacker News says?
100% - works great with Grafana, Metabase, Tableau, etc because it’s just Postgres :-) If you are into the idea of "dashboards as code", you may also enjoy our HCL+SQL approach in mods [1] - runs in your cli, open source, composable, great DX [2] [1] - https://hub.steampipe.io/mods [2] - https://steampipe.io/blog/dashboards-as-code
Comment linking /blog/dashboards-as-code
on “Select * from cloud”Submitted Select * from cloud as a story · 790 points
HN discussionSorry you didn't have a smooth start there :-(. Not sure how the behavior you are describing is happening. We'd be happy to help get things going if you want to open an issue [1] or discuss on Slack [2]. 1 - https://github.com/turbot/steampipe/issues 2 - https://steampipe.io/community/join
Comment linking /community/join
on “Select * from cloud”Submitted Normalizing AWS IAM Policies for use in automated analysis as a story · 32 points
HN discussionPython and boto3 are very powerful in many cases for sure - glad they work well for you. No doubt that multi-region for 1k+ accounts is a large surface area, so we'd love to learn from your experience! Performance is an ongoing focus area for us, including radical improvements in memory usage and startup time in our most recent version - https://steampipe.io/blog/release-0-16-0
Comment linking /blog/release-0-16-0
on “Select * from cloud”Submitted Show HN: Steampipe – select * from cloud; as a story · 24 points
HN discussionHere is one of our favorite examples: https://steampipe.io/blog/use-shodan-to-test-aws-public-ip
Comment linking /blog/use-shodan-to-test-aws-public-ip
on “Select * from cloud”Submitted AWS pre:Invent 2022 – interesting announcements so far leading up to re:Invent as a story · 23 points
HN discussionWe see users running Steampipe on their desktop, in pipelines (e.g. to scan Terraform files) and also as a central service. See "service mode" in the CLI for a Postgres endpoint and a dashboard web server [1] or try docker / kubernetes [2]. We also have a cloud hosted option with dashboard hosting, multi-user support, etc [3]. 1 - https://steampipe.io/docs/managing/service 2 - https://steampipe.io/docs/managing/cont…
Comment linking /docs/cloud/overview
on “Select * from cloud”Submitted Shift Left Join Security: Threat Hunting AWS IPs with Shodan and SQL as a story · 20 points
HN discussionI'm biased, but writing plugins is really fun - and then you can create mods / dashboards for your users as well! Please give it a go - we have a guide [1], 84+ open source plugins to copy [2], many authors in our Slack community [3] and we're happy to get your plugin added to the Steampipe Hub [4]. 1 - https://steampipe.io/docs/develop/writing-plugins 2 - https://github.com/topics/steampipe-plugin 3 - https://steam…
Comment linking /community/join
on “Select * from cloud”Submitted Steampipe v0.2.0 New AWS Multi-Region Queries and Query Caching as a story · 20 points
HN discussionBecause it's just PostgreSQL, Steampipe works out of the box with SQL clients, BI tools and other integrations [1]. Please let us know how you go! 1 - https://steampipe.io/docs/query/third-party
Comment linking /docs/query/third-party
on “Select * from cloud”Submitted Dashboards as Code with HCL and SQL as a story · 16 points
HN discussion"steampipe query" has auto-complete for SQL queries in the interactive terminal - https://steampipe.io/docs/query/query-shell#autocomplete "steampipe service" is a standard Postgres endpoint, so works with any BI tool or SQL client and their autocompletion capabilities - https://steampipe.io/docs/query/third-party "steampipe completion" provides terminal completion for the Steampipe CLI - https://steampipe.io/docs/r…
Comment linking /docs/reference/cli/completion
on “Select * from cloud”Submitted The Hitchhiker's Guide to IAM Policy Wildcards as a story · 12 points
HN discussionSteampipe mostly exposes underlying APIs or data through SQL. So, "select * from aws_s3_bucket" will return bucket names, tags, policies, etc all together. But, bucket size is not a direct API so doesn't have a direct table. In some high value cases we've added tables to simplify / abstract / normalize data - for example AWS IAM policies - https://steampipe.io/blog/normalizing-aws-iam-policies-for-a... This example…
Comment linking /docs/cloud/integrations/metabase
on “Select * from cloud”Submitted Zero-ETL for SQLite: Live-query cloud APIs with 100 new extensions as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSteampipe has their own cloud at https://steampipe.io/docs/cloud/overview Alternative is Cloudquery but they don't offer cloud anymore. https://www.cloudquery.io/ Plug, not based on Steampipe, but we also offer similar managed SQL on your cloud assets. https://www.resmo.com/
Comment linking /docs/cloud/overview
on “Select * from cloud”Submitted A deep dive into AWS Resource Explorer as a story · 9 points
HN discussionYou can run Steampipe CLI in "service mode", getting access to a Postgres endpoint and a dashboard web server [1]. Other users leverage docker / kubernetes to run it [2]. We also have a cloud hosted option with dashboard hosting, multi-user support, etc [3]. 1 - https://steampipe.io/docs/managing/service 2 - https://steampipe.io/docs/managing/containers 3 - https://steampipe.io/docs/cloud/overview
Comment linking /docs/cloud/overview
on “Select * from cloud”Submitted select * from shell; Use SQL to exec commands across hosts as a story · 8 points
HN discussionYou kid, but we found that useful for scripts etc! So, in addition to a secure public Postgres endpoint [1], Steampipe Cloud workspaces have a rest API to run SQL queries and get results in JSON or other formats [2]. 1 - https://steampipe.io/docs/cloud/integrations/overview 2 - https://steampipe.io/docs/cloud/develop/query-api
Comment linking /docs/cloud/develop/query-api
on “Select * from cloud”Submitted Steampipe Hacktoberfest Recap: how the community rallied with 38 contributions as a story · 8 points
HN discussionYes - our users run queries across hundreds of AWS accounts and regions. TBH, we never expected it to scale that far when we started, but it has. Steampipe parallelizes the API calls out and performs appropriate backoff in throttling to gather the results. Steampipe does the API calls needed for the column data requested [1]. So "select instance_id from aws_ec2_instance" is much faster than "select id, tags from aws…
Comment linking /blog/selective-select
on “Select * from cloud”Submitted Protect Auth0 identities from insider threats, credential stuffing, & more as a story · 7 points
HN discussionExcited to see Steampipe shared here - thanks kiyanwang! I'm a lead on the project, so sharing some quick info below and happy to answer any questions. Steampipe is open source [1] and uses Postgres foreign data wrappers under the hood [2]. We have 84+ plugins to SQL query AWS, GitHub, Slack, HN, etc [3]. Mods (written in HCL) provide dashboards as code and automated security & compliance benchmarks [3]. We'd love y…
Comment linking /docs/develop/overview
on “Select * from cloud”Submitted Streamlining incident response investigations with Steampipe relationship graphs as a story · 7 points
HN discussionHey, congrats on the journey! Especially on the community building aspect, it's really impressive that you've been able to spark so many communities on various platforms (Reddit, GitHub, Discord, etc.)! On a more technical note, since dsq is based on the "load it into SQLite and query it from there" architecture, have you considered integrating with the plugin ecosystems of other existing projects based on that same…
Comment linking /
on “One year as a solo dev building open-source data tools without funding”Submitted What's new in the CIS v1.5 benchmark for AWS as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
