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Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

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Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#31

Post by viraptor »

toksvaeth wrote: post #25

Hi there, I'm from AWS and my team are responsible for development of this project (AWS Perspective). It's important to note that Perspective is not a traditional diagramming tool like draw.io or Visio. Perspective is intended to display resources that already exist rather than draw new ones. To do this, Perspective inventories resources in your accounts (Lambdas, DBs, EC2 instances, ENIs, EBS volumes etc.) and can a…

I may be missing some complexity that's not clear from the description, but since all the resources should be available in AWS Config already, why is it using so much extra infrastructure? Why isn't it a "point me at AWS Config dump, I'll give you an explorable static page/SVG" script instead? (The cost part would have to reach out to billing and/or cloudwatch, but still...)

Or expressed a bit differently: what are the infra + 2 data stores doing that's a major improvement over processing raw AWS Config + CUR data which should easily fit in laptop memory. We're talking megabytes of data for a point in time snapshot, right?

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#32

Post by ctvo »

The decentralized nature of Amazon / AWS rears its head again.

It's much harder, I assume, to get security / teams to allow another team to crawl through its customer data (the Lambda team owns which customers have how many Lambdas running where, for example). Now imagine doing that for every AWS resource to form a graph of relationships. To get around that they deployed something that customers are wholly responsible for.

Forcing customers to cover the bill for something AWS should provide out of the box, in this subpar experience where they also need to manage all the infrastructure, is the opposite of customer obsession.

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#33

Post by viraptor »

toksvaeth wrote: post #25

Hi there, I'm from AWS and my team are responsible for development of this project (AWS Perspective). It's important to note that Perspective is not a traditional diagramming tool like draw.io or Visio. Perspective is intended to display resources that already exist rather than draw new ones. To do this, Perspective inventories resources in your accounts (Lambdas, DBs, EC2 instances, ENIs, EBS volumes etc.) and can a…

Is there really no screenshot of the visualisation, or is it just hard to find / hidden on mobile? I assume the architecture diagram is made in another tool.

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#34

Post by toksvaeth »

viraptor wrote: post #33
toksvaeth wrote: post #25

Hi there, I'm from AWS and my team are responsible for development of this project (AWS Perspective). It's important to note that Perspective is not a traditional diagramming tool like draw.io or Visio. Perspective is intended to display resources that already exist rather than draw new ones. To do this, Perspective inventories resources in your accounts (Lambdas, DBs, EC2 instances, ENIs, EBS volumes etc.) and can a…

Is there really no screenshot of the visualisation, or is it just hard to find / hidden on mobile? I assume the architecture diagram is made in another tool.

We just updated the GitHub README with some screenshots so you can see what it looks like.

No, the diagrams of Perspective were not created with Perspective -- we had to stick to existing style guidelines.

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#35

Post by tidepod12 »

bdcravens wrote: post #17

A named AWS service to visualize which named AWS services you are using is peak AWS.

This isn't a "named AWS service" in the same vein of typical services like S3, EC2, etc. This is a "AWS Solution Implementation" which is a list of community created "solutions" built using AWS.

My strong suspicion is that this "AWS Perspective" is something that one of AWS's customers insisted on being built customized for their environment, and then the Solution Architects who designed it for the customer also wanted to get some "external credit" (AWS employees have to create a certain number of externally-facing blog posts/GitHub contributions/etc) so they uploaded it here.

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#36

Post by jeffcarter »

Shameless plug: I wrote AWSets[1], which can be used to do some of this (although the graphs aren't as pretty). It was written because at work we regularly interact with hundreds of AWS accounts and wanted something to quickly scan/catalog all of the resources (launch blog post explains more [2]).

It's free to run locally (doesn't use or require Config), the data is normalized & output as JSON for you to do whatever you want with it. It has better coverage than similar tools (>250 resources & growing), and provides relationship mapping between them as well. It's still a work in progress and might have rough edges, so feel free to file issues to help make it better.

[1] - https://github.com/trek10inc/awsets [2] - https://www.trek10.com/blog/awsets-aws-resource-listing-made...

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#37

Post by chair6 »

For a different angle on cloud infrastructure visualization, check out Abridge (https://abridge.io). I'd love to get any feedback on the idea / site and even a trial, if you're interested!

Abridge collects data across your configured set of AWS accounts & regions. It doesn't draw architecture diagrams, but instead will give you x-vs-y visualizations for a number of different relationships .. IAM users vs. groups, Lambda functions vs. runtimes, EC2 instances vs. keypair, etc.

It'll also provide inventory tables / CSV dumps of the different resource types, and simple free search across all resources.

Security-wise, Abridge collects data via cross-account trusts with the SecurityAudit role, and expires all collected data after 48 hours - more at https://abridge.io/security/.

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#38

Post by drchopchop »

Wait, this graphing tool literally requires you to deploy Neptune, Elasticsearch, ECS, various VPC's/gateways, publish various reports to S3, run Lambda functions, and then after all that the minimum cost is $500+/month?

Luckily it appears to be a "solution" instead of a core AWS product, otherwise I was about to say AWS has turned into a parody of itself.

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#39

Post by pc86 »

esseti wrote: post #7
stemuk wrote: post #4

I have been creating most of my infrastructure diagrams in https://arcentry.com/ and this seems to me like an overcomplicated version of Arcentry.

any good alternative? the service looks neat, but it has been discontinued

Excalidraw is nice once you get the hang of it.

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#40

Post by tidepod12 »

ctvo wrote: post #32

The decentralized nature of Amazon / AWS rears its head again. It's much harder, I assume, to get security / teams to allow another team to crawl through its customer data (the Lambda team owns which customers have how many Lambdas running where, for example). Now imagine doing that for every AWS resource to form a graph of relationships. To get around that they deployed something that customers are wholly responsibl…

>To get around that they deployed something that customers are wholly responsible for.

I doubt they were "getting around" anything. The customer being responsible for it is likely the entire point, because the customer who asked for this to be created probably specifically requested that (based on my experience working with AWS SAs).

This post is an "AWS Solutions Implementation". This isn't a service like S3/EC2/Lambda/etc created to be an integral part of AWS. A "Solutions Implementation" is basically the output of a customer making a very specific request from AWS Solutions Architects to build something customized (eg, customer doesn't want to use AWS Config but they want to build something from scratch with Lambda and RDS that works the same way), and then the solutions architects decide to share it publicly just in case any other customers find the same niche solution useful. It isn't meant for wide appeal or to be used by everyone.

I wouldn't be surprised if the fact that this post is getting decent attention means that AWS will use this solution as a proof of concept for investigating a future managed AWS service where the customer doesn't have to fully manage all of these moving pieces, but this post isn't that.

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