When you work with Microsoft Azure, you no doubt appreciate the value of great network topology diagrams. Good network infrastructure diagrams provide a visual cue for better communication and understanding of your azure cloud infrastructure at all levels of your organisation, from management down to freshly onboarded engineers and consultants. But should you draw Azure diagrams yourself, or automate the process?

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that executes code in response to events such as website actions, https requests, files being modified or written to S3 buckets and a whole host of integrated AWS services that have the capability to trigger lambda functions in response to a state change.

Amazon Web Services offers a wide range of services for building web applications, storing and managing data, managing customer engagement and a whole host of other computing capabilities in the cloud.

If you have been working with AWS cloud architecture for any length of time, you almost certainly understand the importance of documenting your AWS VPCs using network topology diagrams.

Identifying the resources and VPCs in your AWS account and which AWS regions they are deployed in can be a time consuming process that is often put off when there are more important jobs to be done. 

If you have been working with AWS infrastructure for any length of time, you understand the importance of documenting your AWS VPCs using network topology diagrams. They visually represent the construction of your AWS network, and can also speed up the on-boarding of new team members and external consultants. 

Knowing what regions your infrastructure is deployed in is essential when trying to establish what would happen if there is an outage in one particular AWS region. If us-east-1 drops out, can your application continue to function.

So having a diagram that clearly shows what regions host your VPCs and AWS resources is not a bad idea.

AZURE SECURITY VIEW

Despite the name, AWS marketplace isn't related to amazon.com or a handy place to pick up a second hand mountain bike. AWS Marketplace is an AWS managed software catalogue that helps users select, install and manage software and machine images from approved and trusted software vendors. Software installed through the AWS marketplace can be billed directly to your normal AWS account.

When you are building on GCP or working with applications built on GCP as a development or operations engineer you possibly already appreciate the value of a well laid out network topology diagram. Especially if that diagram accurately represents what resources you have configured in your (or your client's) GCP accounts.