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Comment by veermanhas | Hacker News Reader

103 pointsveermanhas60 comments

Looks pretty, anyone know how it compares to Cloudcraft[0]?

Interesting to make it a desktop application and then subscription based.

I found the pricing structure a little unnatural, though. The 5k-10k band seems quite narrow and the way the AWS spend is the first idea makes it seem a little like "we want a % cut of your AWS spend". This might well be true, I'd just be a little more delicate about it :).

[0] https://cloudcraft.co

% of AWS spend is, in my experience (CTO level stuff,) fairly common for AWS ecosystem vendors. It isn't a terrible proxy for complexity of deployment AND is easy for customer to calculate.

Indeed that's how NewRelic seems to have repositioned their infrastructure monitoring. Instead of paying per server, you now pay per server * server capacity.

The major difference I see on a glance is that cloudcraft would need your architecture diagram to be hosted at their service and folks working there can probably see it if they want to, compared to Cloudcraft where it's running locally and no one (as long as you're not compromised) can see it.

Important change if you have sensitive infrastructure you want to keep as secret as possible.

The platform doesn't only show the AWS. You can also take action on the resources by double-clicking on it.

You can even visualize cost on top of your resources too.

It is real time.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll take it up ASAP with the team.

Ugh, the isometric view just makes my brain blow. Is there a standard grid view (ie, view from top). Not as fancy, but a lot more effective in my opinion.

Or a 3D fly through view. "It's a UNIX system! I know this!"

I literally came here to make sure the appropriate Jurassic Park reference was made.

We can make the camera angle configurable, so that users can set it to what they want. Noted

Ok, I like the idea and I want something that does this.

I don't want a desktop app that fills my entire screen. Also, I created a user with sudo IAM permissions and it kept failing validation.

Gave up. :(

I know people facing this issue. You can email me at veer@totalcloud.io. I can help you set up the whole thing.

We are already working on revamping the onboarding documentation.

The app is completely unusable on my linux machine! It took over the entire screen and I lost control of my cursor. All I managed to do was somehow click on the signup button and that was the end of it. Tried switching back to other apps, but the horrible cursor lag continued. Horrible experience!!

Update: Turns out its a Mono app! So it gracefully died with this limerick:

> Importing game controller configs

> Segmentation fault (core dumped)

There are some issues with the Linux binaries which we are already working on. THAT IS THE REASON IT IS IN BETA.

Still working on these kinks.

What flavor of Linux are you running? I would appreciate if you could email me some details at veer@totalcloud.io

I use Ubuntu 17.04.

I agree that it is in Beta version, but that does not mean the application being at a point where user cannot even get his cursor to move and click a button.

It has some kinks on some flavors of Linux.

"It's a Unix system, I know this"

That was my first thought as well :)

To down voters, its a quote from Jurassic Park where the computer shows a similar UI to lock a door.

`fsn` https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)

That's right. Industrial Light & Magic likely used Silicon Graphics machines for their render work. And probably that's where they borrowed they idea.

Reminded me of "Hackers":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmz67ErIRa4

While I'm here, does anyone know of a good application to map my AWS environment for me, kind of like this seems to do, but without all the extra overhead? This seems to offer a lot of awesome stuff, but what I would really like is something to simply generate a one-time picture of my aws environment.

check out https://pathwaysystems.com/video (CTO here) In addition to a very human-usable CLI we have an EC2 agent which will automatically diagram you EC2 resources. Our system then let's you interact with the results using graph queries to analyze and understand it.

I connected the app and poked around a bit. I like the visual representation of my infrastructure, and especially liked the visual mapping of interconnected services.

As others have said, I find the pricing model to be off. Additionally, the app UI looks ands feels dated.

Glad you liked the app.

Right now we are trying to focus on functionality rather than UI. It is already being undertaken by the design team.

I would really appreciate if you could provide some suggestions.

Right now I am reaching to the community to understand the gaps that we should fill for that reason your feedback would be of value to us.

Hijacking thread to provide suggestions:

- Don't have a desktop app (and if you do, use Electron)

- Don't force me to sign in to your app in the first instant (why can't I just use my AWS IAM credentials and you funnel them via your server for setting up my account??)

- Don't open in full screen at a 1997 game resolution with ugly blurry assets

- Don't have the app (OSX) whine about the location I started it from (~/Downloads/), and if you must (what's the reason anyway?) then give me an easy way to quit not hidden in a menu (after taking away my window chrome)

The experience of opening and using your current app has all but assured that I'll never use the product again, which is a terrible shame because I've very recently hurt very badly for a AWS global inventory with associated cost predictions tool.

Fwiw, the app opened in full screen, in the right resolution for me (Macbook Air 2014). Also, why electron? I really like native apps, much faster/smaller.

I have no idea what the colours mean. It appears they are somewhat random, and your site/the documentation makes no attempt to describe the "colour coding", apart from that it's helpful, which it isn't.

The colors are segregated based on the metric that is selected for each resource. Higher value metric color is red and the lowest one is blue. Others come in between.

Let me know if you have any other queries.

I suggest, with that headline you don't provide your landing page, but an example page.

For me, the landing page has the example images on the bottom.

I don't know but I would expect something interactive.

Interesting. I'm giving it a shot.

I found the documentation somewhat confusing.

> Give the bucket a name and attach the sample policy from "My Billing Dashboard" > Preferences.

The first step in configuring the S3 bucket refers to something that's explained in more detail in the second step. Feels like the order of thing is off.

Using cross account access rewarded me with a validation error without helpful instructions. I followed the common issues without luck. I think that's a problem.

Key based access worked for me at the first attempt. However, it's not immediately clear you have to give PowerUser and ReadOnly rights like in the first section.

Good luck with the further development of your product!

Thanks for the feedback. I'll work on the validation part of it.

I'm also seeing a validation error for cross account access.

Just email me at veer@totalcloud.io. I'll help you out with it.

How does that pricing model make sense at all? Differentiating on 5K/mo and lumping everyone else into 'Enterprise' is a bad read of the market.

It further appears [to penalize] companies with a single-account structure, if it factors multiple accounts at all.

I understand your point here. I'll take it up with my team. Fair point.

Does this dynamically generate my topology/diagram by reading from AWS or is it like the other tools on the space where we have to draw/design the diagram ourselves and then "link" it to AWS.

As far as I understood it generates dynamically (a user did that in the comments).

Are you aware of other tools that generates the diagram dynamically?

Yes, you are right. It generates dynamically all the assets and their relationship. You just need to config your AWS account.

On MacOS Sierra, I have moved it to a separate folder and it still tells me to move it to a folder outside of ~/Downloads and there is literally no option to do anything but quit.

You just need to move it out of the folder it is on. That should do the trick.

Why is this not WebGL and running at a Web app/cloud service?

We plan to make an enterprise quality platform with deeper interactions for monitoring, cloud building (through CloudFormation and Terraform etc). We also plan to open the platform so that people can build on top of it. The other aspect is to use Behavioral AI that we encounter in Games and turn it into a Virtual Cloud engineer. Hence we need a robust Game Engine to build on top of.

For us to consider it, it has to be a web app. I don't have time to manage installs on laptops. Also, it's a cool idea to create a virtual cloud engineer, but you're asking people to take on the pain of managing desktop apps for a benefit they don't even see right now.

Noted.

The left/right buttons on the screenshots don't seem to do anything.

I do like the idea of a more visual view of costs. Can it visualize network egress costs too?

I know about that new website underworks. It does provide total cost around it but the split of the cost is still in works.

Looks interesting, how far off is GCP support ooi?

It is still a few months away. What would you prefer seeing in respect to GCP?

I think reasonable parity with what you have now on AWS for visualisation. We do migration work for clients, so (in our use case at least) it'd be a useful tool for the non-technical members to be able to visualise in this way and not from some impenetrable deployment manifests. There is definitely some mileage in showing them costing breakdown too but deep down, the sheer eye-candy factor is probably more useful. Humans are generally attracted to shiny things :)

Edit: Any plans for porting this to webgl or something similar? Browser based would be optimal for us.

Thanks for your views. :)

We do have plans for WebGL and it still being worked on by our team.

I think you could charge more for this or have a lower threshold for the free tier.

We are still trying to find the perfect pricing model and it is a valid point. I'll take this up sooner than later. Appreciate your feedback.

What is your basis for that (chargin more)? Customer needs? (trying to understand your valuation)

We are still trying to find the perfect pricing model and it is a valid point. I'll take this up sooner than later.

Appreciate your feedback.

Fallout Classic: AWS Edition

Would this work with VMware on AWS?

Any AWS service or/and resource associated with the account would be visible.

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