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Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

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Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#51

Post by jcims »

toksvaeth wrote: post #48
jcims wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a list of supported services? I've built a very similar solution using AWS Config to feed Neo4j and it has been incredibly useful, but Config's coverage is so anemic that we are left with just a tiny portion of our infrastructure visible.

We sure do: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/solutions/latest/aws-perspective... If there are more you'd like to see added, please raise an issue: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-perspective

I think what i would really like to see (which may exist already) is a plugin architecture that allows users to easily extend with services they need.

An eventing system that lets you hook node/edge events world be awesome as well.

Will take a look tonight, really interested in this.

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#52

Post by tidepod12 »

ctvo wrote: post #50
tidepod12 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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/Lam…

> 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). I doubt a customer asked AWS: hey, can I get a graph of how the resources in my accounts all interconnect while maintaining the clusters for the data stores, handling up…

>I doubt a customer asked AWS: hey, can I get a graph of how the resources in my accounts all interconnect while maintaining the clusters for the data stores, handling upgrade, security, etc. myself and paying hundreds of dollars a month for the pleasure?

I do consulting for a company that works with a lot of AWS customers and I think you'd be surprised. They don't put it in those exact terms, of course, but I have personal experience with a customer who specifically did want (I think due to their own internal regulatory standards) to maintain their own data stores rather than having an AWS managed service. In my example, it was using AWS Config versus having their own in-house software built on top of Lambda and RDS that did the same thing.

Another situation I've seen a lot is that really large companies have a tendency to think they are a super special snowflake with special use cases that no AWS-built service would ever fulfill, and thus they suffer from "not invented here syndrome". I've consulted many companies where I pitched them using an off-the-shelf product or service, but they will insist that it only covers 90% of their use cases and instead they will build their own custom solution using the AWS core services as building blocks, resulting in something similar to what is seen in the OP.

For the record, I think it's dumb as hell in most cases and I'm not in any way advocating that this solution in the OP is preferable in any way... but unfortunately I do understand how/why it was probably created.

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#53

Post by viraptor »

tidepod12 wrote: post #43
viraptor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Speculation on my part, but this seems to be much more geared towards data analysis of your environment rather than just having an SVG for reference. I'm assuming like most things AWS, this is not targeted at your small-sized startup running 2 VPCs, a handful of subnets, and 10-20 EC2 instances. This is likely built specifically for major enterprises running a hundred thousand instances, with hundreds of VPCs, thousa…

I should've been more clear, but don't confused a static page and SVG with static content. I was thinking closer to a one page interactive app generated from a data snapshot.

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#54

Post by viraptor »

toksvaeth wrote: post #41
viraptor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Hi, That's a good question. Whilst Perspective sources a lot of data from AWS Config, it also supplements and enriches the data from other sources where resources are not supported or where we wanted to show more detail. We'll be adding in other data sources in future, too. Additionally, the AWS Config query language is quite helpful but doesn't expose a graph of the resources. Our approach is to pull the individual…

As with other comment, I should've been more clear. SVG / generated page doesn't mean no filtering. Just a point in time snapshot which doesn't require API calls once generated.

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#55

Post by sciurus »

drchopchop wrote: post #38

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.

I think I count 18 different AWS services in the diagram at https://d1.awsstatic.com/Solutions/Solutions%20Category%20Te...

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#56

Post by hbcondo714 »

jonbronson wrote: post #20
esseti wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Lucidchart Cloud Insights is another player in this space. Full disclosure, I'm part of the team that created it: https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/lucidchart-cloud-insights

We are long time users of Lucidchart and were using the predecessor of Cloud Insights, AWS Import, for creating cloud diagrams of our existing AWS infrastructure. In February, a LucidChart account manager contacted us stating the AWS Import feature would be sunsetted. He offered to onboard our team onto Cloud Insights but we would have to upgrade to an Enterprise account at $199/license/year AND pay $4,000 a year for the Cloud Insights add-on that covers only up to 50 compute resources. We ended up keeping our account as-is and never heard back from the account manager.

Lucidchart is a great product but we were really turned-off & disappointed they essentially took a feature away from us.

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#57

Post by myroon5 »

staticassertion wrote: post #42

This feels like a strange and expensive way to solve this problem. 1. Why do you need a graph database? You could almost certainly keep the entire thing in memory, who has >16GB of infrastructure? 2. 500+ dollars a month for a service that I'll use very infrequently? 3. I feel like all I actually want is something that takes CloudFormation and gives me a picture, for free, in a python script on my laptop. But ok, fin…

> I feel like all I actually want is something that takes CloudFormation and gives me a picture, for free, in a python script on my laptop

you might find this interesting then:

https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/cfn-python-lint/pull/1...

https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/aws-cfn-lint-visual-st...

Re: Visualize AWS Cloud Diagrams

#58

Post by staticassertion »

myroon5 wrote: post #57
staticassertion wrote: post #42

This feels like a strange and expensive way to solve this problem. 1. Why do you need a graph database? You could almost certainly keep the entire thing in memory, who has >16GB of infrastructure? 2. 500+ dollars a month for a service that I'll use very infrequently? 3. I feel like all I actually want is something that takes CloudFormation and gives me a picture, for free, in a python script on my laptop. But ok, fin…

> I feel like all I actually want is something that takes CloudFormation and gives me a picture, for free, in a python script on my laptop you might find this interesting then: https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/cfn-python-lint/pull/1... https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/aws-cfn-lint-visual-st...

Thank you, this looks like what I need.
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