For a monitoring project I’m currently working on I need to get the amount of RAM an RDS Instance has. Unfortunately the aws_db_instance resource doesn’t expose this type of information to us. Terraform does however give us an external datasource that we can take advantage of to provide the data.

First we need to write a wrapper script around an aws ec2 command. We use the describe-instance-types sub-command to get the amount of RAM an instance has. This instance type information, as far as I know, is still relevant to RDS Instance, so it’s safe to use for this purpose. I’m also using the jq command on the final line to return the data in a form Terraform can handle…

#!/bin/bash

set -e

trap 'echo "Failed describing instance type $instance_type exit code $?"' ERR

eval "$(jq -r '@sh "INSTANCE_TYPE=\(.instance_type)"')"

MB=$(aws ec2 describe-instance-types --instance-type "$INSTANCE_TYPE" --query "InstanceTypes[0].MemoryInfo.SizeInMiB")

jq -n --arg mb "$MB" '{"MB":$mb}'

The next important thing is to wrap this script up into a data resource using the external provider…

data "external" "rds" {
  program = ["bash", "${path.module}/bash/rds-ram-mb.sh"]

  query = {
    instance_type = join(".", [split(".", aws_db_instance.rds1.instance_class)[1], split(".", aws_db_instance.rds1.instance_class)[2]])
  }

  depends_on = [aws_db_instance.rds1]
}

We’re setting the instance_type variable using a few Terraform functions. Basically this turns db.t3.micro into t3.micro. This is the format that the aws cli tool in the wrapper script requires. Also note the use of depends_on as the RDS Instance needs to exist before the datasource is run.

With all that in place we can then reference the RAM value like so…

output "instance_ram" {
  value = data.external.rds.result.MB
}

There’s a working demo over at github/rhysmeister

After performing a terraform apply you’ll see the output variable is set to the instance type’s RAM in MB. In this case the RDS instance is a db.t3.micro and it has 1024MB of RAM.

Terraform RDS Instance RAM Output