No one needs network documentation, until they do.

The ability to understand existing cloud infrastructure, communicating the state of play with internal and external stakeholders and quickly responding to unexpected events are all well known reasons to keep on top of your cloud documentation.

There are also some less obvious, but equally important reasons to maintain an up to date set of cloud infrastructure documentation. Let’s take a look at some of the top reasons to document and automate your cloud network topology.

1. Visualize exactly what is running

Auto generating your cloud infrastructure instead of manually drawing your cloud diagrams ensures that you are seeing…

AWS security groups act as a virtual firewall for your EC2 instances to control inbound and outbound traffic.

“Security groups act at the instance level, not the subnet level. Therefore, each instance in a subnet in your VPC could be assigned to a different set of security groups.” — AWS Documentation

Trawling through your VPC flow logs helps provide visibility into your network traffic to detect anomalous traffic and provides insights, however, it still comes with its own risk of error.

Generating a visual diagram from the source of truth with automated layouts to display your network infrastructure as it…

Security is paramount in any IT infrastructure, and is even more critical where the public cloud is concerned.

As the transition from private servers and data centres to cloud solutions gains momentum, the complexity of cloud infrastructure continues to intensify. Typically hosting multiple applications, distributed over different availability zones most cloud configurations present a number of security challenges.

A good security team is a key requirement to any DevOps or engineering organisation and they generally have their work cut out, especially if you have multiple teams working on disparate projects that are continually pushing changes live and altering the configurations…

If you are developing on AWS or any other platform for that matter, you will understand the need for good version control. Git repositories have for a long time been an effective method of controlling software versions, enabling multiple developers to work on the same code base without overwriting each other’s code and providing the opportunity to roll back code in the event of a release introducing unforeseen behaviours, or bugs as they are more commonly referred to.

Amazon CodeCommit is a Git repository but comes with the trademark AWS approach of replication across multiple regions providing a secure, highly…

AWS Fargate is a service that provisions serverless compute resources to run AWS ECS and EKS containers. AWS states that Fargate allows you to focus on building your applications when you let Fargate provision and manage the infrastructure required. Think of it as containers on-demand with no underlying manually created infrastructure that are quick to launch and scale, where you manage everything at the container level.

You specify the resources your application needs to run and Fargate handles the provisioning of compute resources in an isolated and secure instance.

Fargate determines the correct amount of compute resources required, which means…

When you are working with any cloud computing virtual infrastructure, there are many benefits to creating and maintaining accurate network topology diagrams.

You can immediately communicate the network design to both technical engineering staff and also management where necessary. If you are onboarding new engineers, or engaging external consultants, you can bring them up to speed very quickly with a well laid out infrastructure diagram.

If you have spent too many hours manually creating Azure network diagrams to keep tabs on your network design, then you also appreciate how much time is saved and how many errors are eliminated when…

AWS Lambda is a service that allows you to run code and containers without the need to set up, manage or provision servers. Lambda runs your code on highly available compute cloud infrastructure via Functions. Lambda takes care of server and OS maintenance, scaling, code monitoring and activity/error logging.

Lambda functions support multiple languages which are deployed using runtimes. If you are deploying a container image, you define the runtime and Linux distribution when you create your container image. …

Software development can be a long and complex process. The more you can map out and plan, the greater chance you have of success.

Software project planning as evolved from the popular Waterfall method. In a waterfall model, each phase of development must be completed before the next phase can begin and there is no overlapping of the phases. The Waterfall model is the earliest Software Development Lifecycle approach that was used for software development.

In the 1990’s specific iterative methodologies started to emerge. Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber conceived the scrum process in the early 1990s. The term originated…