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It takes a lot of time to document existing cloud infrastructure, especially for large, complex environments. You might have hundreds–if not thousands–of resources spread across regions, VPCs, security groups, and subnets you need to diagram. And modern infrastructure is constantly changing, which makes a diagram out of date as soon as it’s drawn.
To help you get an accurate, real-time view of your AWS and Azure environments, Cloudcraft has revamped its Live experience. With this updated experience, Cloudcraft automatically creates customizable, easy-to-understand diagrams of your entire multi-region environment. In this post, we’ll walk you through how the new Live experience in Cloudcraft enables you to:
- Visualize your architecture across accounts and regions instantly
- Quickly make an infrastructure, network, or security diagram
- Fine-tune diagrams for different needs with grouping and filtering
Visualize your architecture across accounts and regions instantly
Drawing your environment manually can be days’ worth of work and introduce inaccuracies as you switch between your cloud provider’s console and drawing tool. Due to these challenges, automated diagramming is the most efficient and accurate way to document your architecture. But for automated diagrams to truly save time, the layout engine needs to produce clear diagrams by default, so you don’t have to spend time rearranging components.
Cloudcraft’s new Live layout engine dramatically improves the clarity and readability of Cloudcraft’s automated diagrams. Cloudcraft can even draw multiple regions on the same diagram and includes cross-region connections like VPC peering and Transit Gateways. Additionally, the new group-by capability enables you to organize resources by region, VPC, Subnet, Security Group, and Network ACL for AWS environments. For Azure environments, you can group by Region, VNet, and Subnet.
Cloudcraft’s new Live experience also continuously updates your diagram without requiring you to manually rescan. If you edit your diagram, Cloudcraft will seamlessly transition your diagram into snapshot mode, which is integrated with Version History so any changes are automatically saved.
Quickly make an infrastructure, network, or security diagram
Architecture diagrams are rarely a one-size-fits-all solution. To help you create focused diagrams for different use cases, we’ve released presets for infrastructure, network, and security.
These presets automatically apply a set of group bys and filters to produce a curated view of your architecture. For example, while the infrastructure diagram groups by region and VPC, the security diagram also groups by security group. This makes the security preset especially useful for spotting potential security exposures since it shows inbound and outbound rules between services. On the other hand, the network preset adds subnet as an additional grouping, helping network teams spot sources of latency and understand traffic.
Fine-tune diagrams for different needs with grouping and filtering
If you need a custom layout for your use case, adjust the filter and group-by settings and save a custom preset view. Custom presets can be re-used across multiple diagrams. This is useful for quickly making multiple diagrams in the same style, and for keeping diagrams consistent across a large organization.
Cloudcraft pulls in both cloud provider and custom tags automatically which you can use in filters, so you can also make a focused diagram for specific teams, services, cost centers, and more, in different regions and different sets of resources. And if you have a tag cleanup initiative, tag filters and tag search provide a quick way to check whether resources are tagged appropriately and consistently.
In short, Cloudcraft’s new Live experience provides a more powerful, flexible, and clear architecture diagram. Whether you need visibility on large infrastructure, are making documentation, troubleshooting, or doing a security audit, Cloudcraft’s automatic AWS and Azure diagrams will save you time and effort.
Ready to experience the power of Cloudcraft for yourself? Start your 14-day free trial today and visualize your infrastructure with ease.