Cloud Custodian vs Firefly

Cloud Custodian manages cloud resources through policies written in YAML. Each policy names a resource type, filters for selecting resources, and actions to apply to matches. It supports security policy enforcement, compliance, tag policies, cleanup of unused resources, and cost management for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform resources. Policies can respond to provider events through serverless features or run on a cron schedule. Users can validate policies and preview matching resources in dry-run mode before actions execute. Runs can produce policy metrics, structured resource records, and logs for cloud metrics, storage, and logging services. Documented event connections include AWS CloudWatch Events and Config Rules, Azure EventGrid, and GCP AuditLog and Pub/Sub. Installation is documented for Linux, macOS, and Windows, with Docker and Kubernetes operation also described. Kubernetes, Tencent Cloud, and OpenStack support are in beta; Terraform integration is in alpha. Cloud Custodian is free at free and open source under Apache 2.0. An AWS constraint is that event-triggered policies run only in the same region and account, while periodic policies may run elsewhere.

Firefly automates cloud infrastructure with Infrastructure-as-Code and helps teams govern environments and recover from outages or cyberattacks. Its tooling provides IaC orchestration, GitOps guardrails, self-service provisioning, and automated IaC generation. Firefly scans cloud environments to build an inventory and identify unmanaged resources, drift, and misconfigurations. Immutable IaC snapshots can rebuild complete environments in a clean region or account, or roll them back to a pre-breach or last-known-good state. Integrations include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, Jira, and ServiceNow. Its MCP Server connects with compatible tools such as Cursor and Claude for natural-language discovery and codification. Firefly says it scans metadata and configurations without accessing workload data such as S3 contents or VM file systems. It states that it is SOC 2 Type II certified and offers more than 600 built-in policies. The 14-day trial has full feature access; Essential starts at $2,499 per month billed annually.