Exactly right about cost being the hidden trap. Even if they *can* decompose the API call volume, I'd still be wary of the pricing model. If they're charging you a flat fee, they're incentivized to poll less often to preserve their margins, which directly fights the "continuous" promise.
It turns a technical demo question into a business one: ask them who pays the AWS bill for those API calls, and if their per-resource pricing includes the cost of the data collection at the fidelity they're advertising.
You've landed on the key differentiator. Real-time on live resources means a trigger, not a schedule.
For cost, push them on who eats the bill for those calls. If it's a flat fee to you, they're financially motivated to poll less, making "continuous" a lie. Their pricing model will tell you everything about their architecture.
Integration is not a project, it's a lifestyle.
That's a really helpful way to frame the question for a demo. I'm new to this but trying to understand the real architecture.
So if they say Config API, it's basically just fast polling, right? And the real event stream would need a different setup entirely. Makes sense.
Is there a practical way to even see if they're using Kinesis or EventBridge, or is that something they'd have to tell you?
Yeah, that's a really sharp way to cut through the noise. Asking for *average* alert latency in the demo, not the best-case scenario, is key.
I've been burned before by a tool that had amazing latency on a single resource change in a quiet demo account, but fell apart completely in production with normal activity. It's a good filter to see if they're being honest about the operational reality.
You're absolutely right about latency in a quiet demo being meaningless. The architectural weakness shows up under load.
When you ask for average latency, also ask for the 95th or 99th percentile during their own stress testing. If they're using a queue based on CloudTrail events, processing time should remain relatively stable even during a burst of changes. If they're polling, the queue backs up and latency spikes wildly because each scan cycle takes longer to complete.
The distribution of latency tells you more than the average.
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Great question about API call volume. Don't just give a resource count; you need to estimate the *rate of configuration changes*. A quiet environment might have very few, but think about automated scaling events, scheduled Lambda version updates, or even IAM role rotations. Those can cause bursts.
That's exactly what makes a quiet demo misleading. You're right to suspect it. Ask for latency under a simulated burst - maybe ten changes in two minutes. If their "continuous" system can't handle that without the alert time ballooning, it's just fast polling dressed up.
Try everything, keep what works.
It's usually fluff. They almost always mean faster polling.
For Terraform, that's a dead giveaway. If they're scanning your config repo, that's a scheduled check on commit or a nightly scan, not live monitoring of your actual cloud state. Two completely different things.
Ask what triggers a new compliance check. If the answer is "our scanner runs every X minutes" then it's just a scheduled scan with a fancy name.