A lot of our infrastructure and security tooling lives in AWS, with some Azure in the mix too. I’m curious whether Tines has native integrations for cloud services like Lambda, S3, EC2, Azure Sentinel, and so on, or whether I’d be building HTTP integrations from scratch for each one. What’s the experience like working with major cloud providers in Tines?
Tines works really nicely with AWS, Azure, and GCP. It does this by calling their REST APIs through the HTTP Request action. There aren’t SDK-style native connectors, but in practice, that rarely gets in the way.
First, all three providers have thorough, well-documented REST APIs covering just about everything you’d want (S3, Lambda, EC2, Sentinel, you name it). On top of that, we at Tines ship a big library of prebuilt templates for these services, so a lot of the time, you’re just dropping in a preconfigured action and filling in the blanks rather than building from scratch. And for anything that doesn’t have a template yet, you can paste a cURL command straight from the provider’s API docs and Tines will turn it into a working action.
The bit people usually worry about is authentication, which is handled for you:
- AWS: The classic AWS headache is that it needs Signature Version 4 request signing. Tines has a dedicated AWS credential type that does the SigV4 signing automatically, so you never have to touch it. It also supports role-based (cross-account) access via an IAM role, which is what AWS recommends and keeps you away from long-lived access keys. There’s a connect flow that walks you through the whole setup.
- Azure: Service principal auth via OAuth 2.0 is the standard route, and Tines’ OAuth credential type handles the token flow (refresh included). That covers Sentinel and the rest of the Azure surface.
- GCP: Service account credentials work in a similar OAuth-based way.
Once you’ve set up auth for a provider, hitting individual services is mostly just pointing the action at the right endpoint and shaping the payload. You configure the credential once and reuse it where needed, so it scales nicely as you add more workflows.
A few spots worth pointing you to:
- The Story Library has ready-to-clone AWS and Azure workflow templates.
- The docs cover AWS credential setup (including role-based access) and the OAuth 2.0 credential type for Azure and GCP.
- The Blog has cloud security automation examples if you’d like to see these in action.