Best Diagram Tool for Cloud Consultants

So you just landed a new cloud customer and it’s your job to work out how their existing cloud network infrastructure has been cobbled together over the years.

Maybe they are primarily an AWS shop, or prefer Azure or are cool kids and have gone all in on Google Cloud. Or maybe they are uber cool and have adopted a hybrid cloud approach. Either way you have some long tedious hours or days ahead of you trying to unravel exactly how these multiple vendor accounts hang to together. By days, we obviously mean weeks.

Maybe you have been tasked with increasing application performance or streamlining the many disconnected workflows to provide a more stable, more available application that continues to perform under increasing traffic load. Or perhaps it’s your job to ensure the systems are robust and have enough redundancy built in to survive a regional cloud vendor outage.

Either way, from our time providing expert cloud consulting services back in the day, the very first task (after finding the coffee machine) was to always gather all the production, development and staging/testing cloud accounts and map out all the environments in diagram form.

This meant combing through all the client’s cloud consoles and building a picture of all the virtual networks that were configured including the test/dev VPC’s…