Existing applications

Bref Cloud can monitor applications it did not deploy: applications deployed with the serverless CLI, Laravel Vapor applications, and RDS databases created outside of Bref Cloud. It finds them by scanning the AWS accounts connected to your team.

Scanning an AWS account

Bref Cloud scans an AWS account once, right after it is connected. To scan it again, for example after deploying new applications with the serverless CLI:

1. Open the AWS accounts  page.
2. Open the menu of the account, and click “Scan for apps and databases”.

The scan runs in the background, in every region enabled in the AWS account. The applications and databases it finds appear in Bref Cloud within a few minutes. Team members with the Write or Admin role can start a scan.

What is imported

CloudFormation stacks

Bref Cloud imports the CloudFormation stacks that contain Lambda functions, and whose name has the <application>-<environment> format. This is the format of the stacks that the serverless CLI creates (<service>-<stage>): the my-app-prod stack becomes the prod environment of the my-app application. The environment name is the part after the last dash.

Nested stacks, and stacks without a dash in their name, are ignored. An environment that already exists in Bref Cloud is not changed.

Laravel Vapor applications

Bref Cloud imports the Lambda functions tagged laravel-vapor. Each Vapor application becomes a vapor-<application ID> application in Bref Cloud, with one environment per Vapor environment.

Monitoring Vapor applications is limited: Bref Cloud shows their logs and basic metrics, but not their deployments, queues, files or health checks, and it cannot delete them. To move a Vapor application to Bref, see Migrating from Laravel Vapor.

Databases

Bref Cloud imports the RDS instances and clusters (including Aurora) of the AWS account. They are listed in the Databases  page, with their hostname, port, metrics and snapshots. A database that has the same name as a database created by Bref Cloud is skipped.

Bref Cloud updates the imported databases every day, and removes the ones that were deleted in AWS.

Deploying an imported application with Bref Cloud

Imported applications are marked “not deployed by Bref Cloud”: they have no deployment history in Bref Cloud.

To deploy an application imported from a serverless CLI stack with Bref Cloud, add your team to serverless.yml (learn more), then deploy the same environment with bref deploy --env=<stage>. Bref Cloud reuses the imported environment and its AWS account, and the serverless CLI updates the existing stack.