Count VMs Across AWS, Azure & GCP in 2 Minutes

How many virtual machines are actually running across your clouds right now? With CloudQuery it's one question and about 2 minutes. By hand, it's closer to 2 hours.

In this Ask CloudQuery episode we run the exact same request two ways.

THE CLOUDQUERY WAY (~2 minutes)
We ask the CloudQuery AI assistant: "Show count of virtual machines across all cloud environments." It searches for VM-related tables, finds the unified cloud_assets table that covers every provider, filters for compute instance resource types, and returns the answer — Total VMs: 23, with a full breakdown by cloud provider. No SQL written by hand, no per-provider scripts.

THE MANUAL WAY (~2 hours)
An engineer starts with Phase 1: counting AWS EC2 instances via
aws ec2 describe-instances, piped and filtered for running state. That phase alone is 5–10 minutes — and EC2 is a regional service, so a single call only returns one configured region. To get a real total you loop every region, then start over for Azure, then again for GCP, then reconcile three different output formats into one number you can defend.

WHY IT MATTERS
Cloud asset inventory that's stale or stitched together by hand is the reason cost reviews stall, audits drag, and "how many VMs do we run?" turns into a week-long thread. CloudQuery normalizes AWS, Azure, and GCP into one queryable schema, so multi-cloud asset management questions get answered in minutes instead of afternoons.

Ask your own question of your cloud inventory: https://cloudquery.io

ABOUT ASK CLOUDQUERY
A short series where we take a real question engineers get asked about their cloud infrastructure and answer it live — once with CloudQuery, once the hard way.

CloudQuery is part of env zero.

#MultiCloud #CloudAssetInventory #CloudQuery