AWS integration

Query and manage AWS infrastructure with natural language and AI-powered automation

Clanker integrates deeply with AWS, enabling you to query infrastructure, generate execution plans, and automate cloud operations using natural language commands.

Core capabilities

Clanker’s AWS integration provides three main modes of operation:

Ask mode

Query your AWS infrastructure with natural language

Maker/apply workflow

Generate and execute AWS CLI plans for infrastructure changes

Service support

Comprehensive coverage of 50+ AWS services

Static commands

Direct resource queries without AI interpretation

Authentication

Clanker uses AWS CLI credentials and supports multiple authentication methods:

AWS profile configuration

Configure AWS profiles in ~/.clanker/config.yaml:

infra:
  default_provider: aws
  default_environment: dev
  aws:
    environments:
      dev:
        profile: dev-profile
        region: us-east-1
      prod:
        profile: prod-profile
        region: us-west-2

SSO and temporary credentials

Clanker automatically handles:

• AWS SSO profiles via aws configure export-credentials
• Temporary credentials with session tokens
• Profile-specific region resolution

From ~/workspace/source/internal/aws/client.go:94-118:

func NewClientWithProfileAndDebug(ctx context.Context, profile string, debug bool) (*Client, error) {
    // Try to get credentials from AWS CLI first (works better with SSO)
    creds, err := getCredentialsFromCLI(ctx, profile)
    if err != nil {
        // Fallback to standard SDK approach
        cfg, err := config.LoadDefaultConfig(ctx, config.WithSharedConfigProfile(profile))
        // ...
    }
    // Create AWS config with CLI-provided credentials
    cfg, err := config.LoadDefaultConfig(ctx,
        config.WithCredentialsProvider(credentials.NewStaticCredentialsProvider(
            creds.AccessKeyId,
            creds.SecretAccessKey,
            creds.SessionToken,
        )),
        config.WithSharedConfigProfile(profile),
    )
}

Quick start examples

Query EC2 instances

clanker ask "What EC2 instances are running?"

List Lambda functions with errors

clanker ask "Show me lambda functions with high error rates" --aws

Create infrastructure with maker mode

# Generate a plan
clanker ask "Deploy a PostgreSQL RDS instance" --maker > plan.json

# Review and apply
clanker ask --apply --plan-file plan.json

Use specific AWS profile

clanker ask "List S3 buckets" --profile prod-profile

AI-powered context gathering

Clanker intelligently determines which AWS services to query based on your question:

func (c *Client) GetRelevantContext(ctx context.Context, question string) (string, error) {
    questionLower := strings.ToLower(question)
    
    if strings.Contains(questionLower, "ec2") || strings.Contains(questionLower, "instance") {
        ec2Info, err := c.getEC2Info(ctx)
        // ...
    }
    
    if strings.Contains(questionLower, "lambda") || strings.Contains(questionLower, "function") {
        lambdaInfo, err := c.getLambdaInfo(ctx)
        // ...
    }
}

From ~/workspace/source/internal/aws/client.go:198-232.

Discovery mode

Enable comprehensive infrastructure discovery:

clanker ask "Show me all active AWS services" --discovery

Discovery mode:

• Checks all AWS services in parallel
• Returns counts and availability status
• Identifies active resources across your infrastructure

Compliance reporting

Generate compliance documentation:

clanker ask --compliance

Produces SSP (System Security Plan) reports with:

• Services, ports, and protocols table
• Security controls and mitigations
• External access and risk assessment
• Professional government security documentation format

Compliance mode automatically enables discovery for comprehensive service coverage.

Multi-region support

Clanker handles multi-region operations:

# Query specific region
AWS_REGION=us-west-2 clanker ask "List EC2 instances"

# Region-aware maker plans
clanker ask "Deploy ALB in us-east-1 and us-west-2" --maker

For destructive operations across regions, Clanker groups commands by region to avoid interleaved deletes.

Next steps

Ask mode details

Learn about querying AWS infrastructure

Maker/apply workflow

Generate and execute infrastructure plans