Projects Overview
A Guard Project is a governance container for proposing, reviewing, and approving infrastructure changes. Instead of making changes ad-hoc, Projects give your team a structured process with accountability and an audit trail.
What a Project contains
Every Project includes:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | A descriptive title for the change (e.g. "Migrate staging to Graviton instances") |
| Intent | The type of change: Create, Modify, Optimise, or Destroy |
| Description | A detailed explanation of what is being proposed and why |
| Affected resources | The AWS resources that will be impacted |
| Estimated cost impact | The expected change in costs (increase, decrease, or neutral) |
| Approval rules | Who needs to approve before the change can proceed |
| Version history | A record of all changes to the proposal |
Project intents
| Intent | Use case | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Create | Launching new infrastructure | Deploying a new ECS cluster for a microservice |
| Modify | Changing existing infrastructure | Upgrading RDS instance types |
| Optimise | Reducing costs or improving efficiency | Rightsizing over-provisioned EC2 instances |
| Destroy | Decommissioning infrastructure | Removing unused NAT Gateways |
How Projects group infrastructure
Projects are scoped to your Connections and can reference resources across multiple AWS accounts and regions. This lets you propose changes that span your entire environment in a single, reviewable unit.
Resources in a Project can be:
- Existing resources — Selected from your connected AWS accounts
- Planned resources — Described manually for new infrastructure that does not yet exist
Creating a Project
- Navigate to Guard > Projects > Create Project
- Fill in the Project details (name, intent, description)
- Add affected resources
- Configure approval rules
- Submit for review
[SCREENSHOT: create-project.png -- Project creation form with intent selector and resource list]
The Project is created in Draft state. See Workflow for the full lifecycle.
In this section
- Approval Rules — Configure who can approve changes and under what conditions
- Workflow — The full lifecycle from Draft to Executed