When you or your team are building applications on AWS you will reach a point where you need to ensure what you intended to build has been executed according to the design brief. Whether you are a cloud enterprise architect, program manager, infrastructure or security architect, cloud operations engineer, application architect, DevOps or an application developer, at every step of the application development and deployment lifecycle, you need to know exactly what has been build and what is running.

There are lots of reasons why you should accurately diagram and document your AWS environments. Knowing exactly what is running based on the actual resources configured in your AWS environments is probably the number one reason to generate network diagrams from AWS.  

Once you have a clear line of sight on your network topology, you can instantly assess whether the network is running as intended.

When you are building applications and networks on AWS, there are many compelling reasons why you would want to accurately diagram and document your AWS infrastructure. Knowing exactly what is running based on the actual resources configured in your AWS environments is probably the number one reason to use an automated AWS infrastructure diagram generator over manually drawing diagrams yourself using a drag and drop process.

As a cloud professional working with Microsoft Azure, you no doubt appreciate the value of great cloud architecture diagrams. Well laid out Azure diagrams provide a visual cue for better communication and understanding of your cloud infrastructure at all levels of your organisation, from management down to freshly onboarded engineers and consultants.

AWS cloud architecture can get complex fast. Once you rotate through a few engineers or external consultants how confident are you that someone within your organisation knows exactly what you have running in your cloud accounts and are those resources actually being used.

Having up to date diagrams can be invaluable when you want to know how your networks hang together or need to explain to stakeholders what you have running and why.

The problem with creating and maintaining network diagrams manually is finding the time to do it in the first place, which is never anyone's priority and then finding the time to update the diagrams when things change (which they invariably do) 

If you have worked with Microsoft Azure for any length of time, you will appreciate the value of great network topology diagrams. Azure 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?

With the wide adoption of containers as a method of rapidly deploying software applications to the cloud, the need to visualise workloads has been gaining momentum. The need to see the status of pods and tasks in container clusters is a major benefit when you visualise containerised workloads on an interactive diagram.

Hava has always generated diagrams for traditional compute VPCs and virtual networks and for a long time has also automatically generated AWS ECS Cluster diagrams when clusters are detected in a connected AWS account.

The ability to diagram other containerised workloads, particularly the market leading Kubernetes  has now been added to the core functionality of Hava so you can now view AWS EKS Kubernetes clusters, Azure Kubernetes Clusters (AKS), Google Kubernetes Clusters (GKE) and also stand alone Kubernetes Clusters 

One of the diagrams that is automatically generated when you connect your AWS account to Hava is the AWS ECS Container View. 

If you are building solutions on Microsoft Azure, at some point you'll want to draw some Azure architecture diagrams 

When you have accurate and up to date architecture diagrams on hand it enables you to visually explain your network infrastructure to both your engineering and operations team and also provide management with an easy to understand representation of what you are building and managing.

Accurate up to date diagrams also let you know that your network has been built in line with your design.

If you are onboarding new engineers, or engaging external consultants, you can bring them up to speed very quickly with a well laid out Azure network topology diagram.

The problem with traditional diagrams has always been the time it takes to draw them, which is why it's better to consider generating them instead. If you use manual drag and drop diagram software or drawing packages like Microsoft Visio the process can take forever which is why up to date Azure network topology diagrams are rarely on hand. Cloud engineers almost always don't have the time or motivation to sit down and draw Azure architecture diagrams. Who doesn't have far more important or pressing issues to work on.

This is where you can leverage Hava to help you create Azure diagrams.

If you are taking on a new client or development project, having access to infrastructure documentation is a massive advantage when trying to understand exactly what is running on your network. Come to think of it, with the complex nature of cloud consoles and network configurations you may be surprised at what you have running in your existing Azure infrastructure.

Back in the day our team provided expert cloud consulting services. When we took on a new client, diagramming the new client's infrastructure was always the first job in the process. It was always, without exception, time consuming, laborious but necessary in establishing exactly what was going on in the client's cloud accounts prior to starting work on improving or redesigning the network infrastructure.

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?

As a cloud professional working with Microsoft Azure, you no doubt appreciate the value of great network topology diagrams. Azure diagrams provide a visual cue for better communication and understanding of your cloud infrastructure at all levels of your organisation, from management down to freshly onboarded engineers and consultants.