AWS RDS, S3 and Load Balancer Support in JDisc

Dear JDisc friends, AWS cloud environments continue to redefine how organizations manage their infrastructure—offering flexibility, scalability, and efficiency that traditional setups struggle to match. However, this also introduces a new challenge: gaining visibility into cloud resources such as AWS RDS, S3 Buckets, and Load Balancer —services often outside traditional network discovery’s scope.

That’s why cloud discovery for AWS, especially for key services like AWS RDS, S3 Buckets, and Load Balancers, is more important than ever. It helps you account for, secure, and fully integrate your cloud infrastructure into your IT asset management processes.

We’re excited to introduce a powerful new extension to our AWS Cloud Discovery module in JDisc Discovery. In addition to existing features, we now support Amazon RDS, S3 Buckets, and Load Balancers! These additions bring deeper insights into your AWS environment, giving you the ability to maintain a complete, accurate, and up-to-date inventory of your cloud assets—including AWS RDS database instances and other critical resources.

If you’re looking to strengthen visibility into your on-premises infrastructure as well, don’t miss our IP Scanner article, where we highlight how JDisc can automatically detect and scan unmanaged IP ranges to ensure full network coverage.

🛢 AWS RDS Discovery in JDisc (Relational Database Service)

Once you configure your Amazon cloud account in JDisc and trigger a Cloud Discovery Job, JDisc will discover RDS instances as standard devices.But we don’t stop at basic detection.

For each RDS instance, you’ll find:

• The application (database engine) listed in the Software tab.
• Important details like version, port, and configuration data.
• Integration with our End-of-Life (EOL) tracking feature, so you know when your database software reaches its end of support.

JDisc automatically maps other useful metadata to custom attributes, allowing you to review all technical properties even if no dedicated field exists yet.

🪣 Amazon S3 Buckets

S3 Buckets are now reflected within your device tree under: Hardware → Disks → Logical Disks.

There, users can inspect:

• The size of stored items in the bucket.
• Additional metadata like bucket region or storage class, again accessible through custom attributes.

This helps integrate storage visibility from AWS right into your infrastructure overview.

⚖ Amazon Load Balancer

Load Balancers are critical for managing traffic and availability in cloud deployments. JDisc Discovery now identifies these as devices under the Network section, with a new Load Balancer Configuration tab.

Inside, you’ll find:

• The target group associated with the load balancer.
• The assigned EC2 instances (often called pool members) that are part of the balancing group.

🔗 Important: A target group is mandatory when creating a Load Balancer. It defines where incoming traffic should be routed. Without a target group, the Load Balancer cannot be created. Additionally, the target group must be linked to at least one EC2 instance.

You can learn more about how to define EC2 instances permissions in our AWS article, where we walk you through the process of launching, configuring, and tagging EC2 instances suitable for inclusion in a target group.

As with the other services, extra details are available via custom attributes, giving you access to the full picture with minimal manual effort.

Required IAM Permissions for AWS RDS, S3, Load Balancer & EC2

At minimum, the following AWS API permissions must be included in the IAM policy:

• RDS: rds:DescribeDBInstances, rds:DescribeDBClusters, rds:ListTagsForResource

• S3: s3:ListAllMyBuckets, s3:GetBucketLocation, s3:GetBucketTagging, s3:ListBucket

• Load Balancer: elasticloadbalancing:DescribeLoadBalancers, elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTags, elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTargetGroups

• EC2 (for target groups): ec2:DescribeInstances, ec2:DescribeTags

These permissions allow JDisc to retrieve metadata safely and efficiently, without the ability to modify resources.

📆 Creating Sample AWS Services

Want to test it out? Here’s how to create each service:

Create AWS RDS Instance:

1. Go to the RDS Console.
2. Click “Create database.”
3. Choose a database engine (e.g., PostgreSQL).
4. Choose a tier for the service.
5. Set credentials and configuration.
6. Make the DB publicly accessible.
7. Click “Create database.”

Create S3 Bucket:

1. Go to the S3 Console.
2. Click “Create bucket.”
3. Enter a unique name and region.
4. Configure settings (default is fine).
5. Click “Create bucket.”

Create Load Balancer (ELB):

1. Go to EC2 Console > Load Balancers.
2. Click “Create Load Balancer.”
3. Choose Application Load Balancer.
4. Set listeners, AZs, and target group.
5. Add EC2 instances.
6. Click “Create.”

Running Your First AWS Cloud Discovery

Getting all of this up and running is simple:

1. Go to the Cloud Account Configuration in JDisc and connect your AWS account.
2. Trigger a Cloud Discovery Job.
3. Watch as RDS, S3, and Load Balancers are discovered, enriched, and added to your device inventory—automatically.

With support for AWS RDS, S3 Buckets, and Load Balancers, JDisc Discovery now gives you broader visibility across your cloud infrastructure. From permissions to metadata mapping and end-of-life tracking, our enhanced cloud discovery helps you stay in control of your AWS assets—easily and securely.

Cheers, Raphael