Show HN: Cloud Maker – Rapidly create cloud architecture diagrams | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Cloud Maker – Rapidly create cloud architecture diagrams

cloudmaker.ai

123 pointst4l0s39 comments

Gave it a try. Here's my feedback in no particular order:

- I couldn't get into my account to start playing around for a while because your email verification is flagged as spam

- Basic resources like AWS Security Groups are missing. The product seems to heavily lean towards Azure

- I like that you provide an infinite grid for free (cloudcraft only has this on their paid plan)

- I don't like the clutter of having all the Azure/GCP/AWS resources grouped by type ("Compute", "Databases", etc). 99% of companies are single-cloud and it would be more convenient if I could filter down to just AWS

- Lots of UI buttons are missing tooltips - I have no idea what your icons mean

- There's no account editing, you can't change your password & there's no 2fa support

> I don't like the clutter of having all the Azure/GCP/AWS resources grouped by type ("Compute", "Databases", etc). 99% of companies are single-cloud and it would be more convenient if I could filter down to just AWS

But it would be very cool to have details abstracted in a way that it would be easier to build architectures for several cloud providers with one diagram.

This sounds great in theory but I would be interested to see if anyone has successfully abstracted the provider out if their architecture.

In my experience the only way to do this is to limit your service to leveraging the lowest common features of services that are common to each privider.

Really depends on what you're doing. If you have something like a simple Rails stack it's fairly trivial.

From experiences it's easy enough to abstract NoSQL (i.e. AWS DynamoDB and GCP Firestore) and Serverless functions (AWS Lambda and GCP Cloud Functions), although you need to write abstractions for them in your code.

I have no experience with ML, but I'd imagine that's where it gets a lot harder to abstract these out.

Both Microsoft [1] and Google [2] provide tables with their equivalents to AWS services.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/aws-prof...

[2] https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/map-aws-google-cloud-plat...

> Serverless functions (AWS Lambda and GCP Cloud Functions)

Look for severless benchmarks on your favorite search engine. The performance and trade-off for what seems to be the same service are not homogeneous across providers. This could completely change your costs, and then your architecture. To compare cloud providers or build multi-providers cloud, you have to be careful at comparing apples and apples, or build some kind of simulator first

Running kubernetes on a cloud system allows abstraction of the provider. We have tried it (in testing) between Azure and AWS, having a simple POC system running part on each.

Or a “generic cloud” set

I remember reading that something like 80% of large companies are multi cloud. This stat came from some group that puts out a big report on the state of the cloud industry each year.

Probably true, but my own experience tells me that they also run distinct services on multiple clouds that are unrelated and isolated, rather than running services across clouds. (For the most part: I have seen a few cross-cloud applications. Never optimal.)

If you have a company of 5k plus employees different teams are bound to use different cloud providers without even being aware of such. Such companies are also those being interviewed by Gartner or Forrester etc.

But since it's different teams using different providers, there's not much need to make a single diagram with multiple providers.

Also got flagged as spam here. Might be worth checking your SPM and DKIM config.

I think this is an idea with great potential. Making it work seamlessly would be a challenge.

For example: Elastic Beanstalk for NodeJS gives you a good starting point for a web backend. However, I had to hand-edit the EBS environment configurations to add Redis, Postgres, force HTTPS, and so on. I'd love to add a CI/CD pipeline when I find the time.

Could I do these with your tool? Probably not today. It would be awesome to be able to drag and drop gateways, firewalls, set in/out ports. Conceptually this is all one should need to get an EBS set up.

That's the plan - the next feature we're working on will allow you to deploy the architecture you've defined in your diagram.

Cloud providers should auto-generate these kinds of graphs and make this available as part of their Web UI.

Agreed. In AWS for example you can add name/tags to things. Would be cool if it could import all of the stuff like “Name:project” and then attempt to flow it out. It could also read firewall and port settings to determine what’s public facing. Maybe as an added value it could scan related s3 buckets and try to visualize their settings as well. You could more easily see that buckets are u intentionally public or not.

Cool ideas!

I'm sure they will, if it looks like 3rd party services are making money at it.

This is the problem with building your product on one of these platforms: you're just doing their market research for them for free.

Or maybe even offer to acquire you?

We’re building a visual design platform for cloud infrastructure. We’ve just released our public preview which allows you to diagram solutions for AWS, Azure and GCP for free. Included out of the box are the latest icons for each platform and we offer a streamlined experience for creating cloud infrastructure diagrams versus generic drawing tools.

We’d love to hear your feedback!

I've always wanted a infrastructure diagram tool that would actually create the architecture using my AWS account. How feasible is that?

There is also cloundcraft.co [1] which I have been using for a year or so now and would recommend.

1. https://cloudcraft.co/

CloudCraft is quite nice, I first saw it used here [^1]. Seeing diagrams drawn out in perspective is extremely useful.

[1]: https://serifandsemaphore.io/how-to-host-wordpress-like-a-bo...

AWS has one, though I found it too clunky to actually use

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui...

cloudcraft.co supports this (on their paid plan), and there are also some open source tools like cloudmapper (only for AWS): https://github.com/duo-labs/cloudmapper

We're currently working hard on exactly this feature :)

1. Examples. 5+. Draw in a user.

2. On prem installs need to be fully creatable. Draw in smaller users. 'Azure' can be on self hosted on prem. Small and medium businesses dwarf large businesses for new Azure sales.

congratulations on the launch!

When i click "Sign Up Free", you go to a page that only has "Sign In" options.

You then have to click (i did in a UI bruteforcing attempt) "Sign In with Email" to find a tiny font saying "Do you need an account"

It's like you are trying to hide email sign ups.

Thanks for the feedback - will take a look at improving the UX on that user journey!

Requiring a signup for a free trial of something that doesn't inherently need an account pretty much instantly turns me off.

Feature request: automatically generate architecture diagrams from Terraform (or other 'infrastructure-as-code') files.

You may be aware (and I understand that it's noiser than 'architecture diagram') but terraform can output for graphviz.

I believe I've read AWS can too, so if you're 100% on AWS that's probably pretty close to what you'd want.

Really appreciate the feedback - that's on our backlog!

I was excited about this, as I need to update our architecture diagrams. However, first feedback:

* Heroku didn't return anything in the search

* AWS API gateway neither.

* ok, I'll start from our webserver (on heroku). No general webserver icon either.

* I'll start with the DB. No generic DB icon. MariaDB only for Azure..

So far, all my starting points are dead ends. I could work partially around them by selecting other services (mariaDb does exist as a Azure service), but that feels ugly/hacky..

I am fan of CloudCraft which has some awesome AWS specific features such as importing resources from AWS, cost reports, and auto-syncing resources. Adding Google Cloud is a heavily requested feature which I am sure they are working on.

How does Cloud Maker differ, stack-up to CloudCraft?

Does CloudCraft allows generation of CloudFormation or terraform templates from the diagram?

A lot of these architecture diagram tools have been popping up lately. Seems like something that could be generated from accessing each of the cloud providers right?

This Seems similar to https://www.happi.io

what about the other way around? Generate a diagram from your existing cloud (and then maybe tweak the diagram then round-trip it)

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