Auto Update Cloud Diagrams

Most developers and engineers working with cloud infrastructure will agree that a well laid out network topology diagram is an essential tool when either communicating how the network is built, or for use when tracking down the reason for an application outage or performance dip.

The major problem with network diagrams is that they are practically useless unless they are up to date.

If you are using manual drag and drop drawing tools like Visio or other charting tools to manually construct network topology diagrams you are at a double disadvantage. Firstly you need to spend a mind numbing amount of time transposing console configuration settings onto a diagram while performing analysis on each resource to find out where it fits on the diagram in terms of availability zones, VPCs or virtual network and subnets.

Secondly once you have spent days or weeks of your valuable time mapping out your infrastructure diagram, the dynamic nature of cloud computing would normally mean that by the time you have finished, something has changed. Maybe some compute instances have auto scaled in or out, or your database admin has replicated an RDS instance or your security consultants have added a firewall or changed port settings. Whatever the cause, if you don’t keep on top of every single change to your network the chances are your diagram is out of date and no…