A Comprehensive Client Communication Guide for MSPs

Can you communicate to your MSP/PS clients exactly what they have running, where those resources are located, how they are secured and what the impact is when things change.

Managing multiple or even hundreds or thousands of client cloud accounts is no small feat. The volume of resources, the complexity of architectures, and the variety of services involved can make this a daunting task. When you need to respond to alerts or critical errors, you need to find the affected resources, environments and the cloud account that contains them fast.

This is the challenge faced by MSPs and professional services organisations across the globe on a daily basis.

However, the advanced deep search tool built into Hava can dramatically simplify this process.

Cloud Infrastructure Visualization is the best way to get all your team on the same page when it comes to what cloud computing resources you have running.

Introduction: The Best AWS Diagram Generator

There's no question organizations need robust cloud infrastructure and security management tools to ensure their data and resources remain secure.

Harnessing the Power of CMDB in Cloud Computing: The Importance of Cloud Diagrams

Hava cloud infrastructure diagrams are extremely useful for understanding how cloud environments are constructed. They show you what is running, where it is running, how resources are connected and how they are secured.

Diagrams are kept up to date by background tasks that periodically scan for changes in your connected cloud accounts.

Hava diagrams are even more useful when you place them in the web properties where you and your team are working.

Hava's Github Action on the GitHub marketplace is one way you can leverage accurate cloud infrastructure diagrams without being logged into Hava.

In the modern cloud computing landscape, teams need the ability to change architecture fast. When you adopt a CI/CD or dynamic approach to application development and deployment, the pace of change can mean your cloud architecture is a constantly moving target.

Why automate cloud Infrastructure Diagrams?

If you are subject to ISO PCI SOC or other audits that look into the security, and location of your cloud infrastructure that contains your customer data then you already know the challenges.

As cloud technology advances, engineers are tasked with managing increasingly complex infrastructure. One of the most time-consuming tasks is creating and updating infrastructure diagrams.

As a cloud network architect you’ll often find yourself redesigning and maintaining existing network infrastructure for applications, with the aim of making them faster and more highly available. Infrastructure diagrams play a critical role in this process by providing a visual representation of the network architecture, which is essential for communication, troubleshooting, and planning. 

There comes a point in every cloud project where a redesign of the infrastructure is required. It might be for performance reasons, to make the environment more resilient and highly available, or it might be to take advantage of new resources or methodologies that will improve your application's performance and make it easier to maintain.

In this post you are going to learn exactly how you can examine what you have running in your cloud accounts without having to spend hours or days trawling through your cloud consoles trying to establish how exactly does this thing hang together.

As a cloud engineer, you understand the complexities and challenges of managing and monitoring cloud environments. The ever-evolving nature of cloud infrastructure requires frequent updates, changes, and modifications which comes with plenty of challenges. 

When you are building complex applications with lots of moving parts and hosting them in the cloud, it can be easy to loose sight of exactly what is happening. Explaining how the latest micro service integrates with the existing infrastructure to the rest of the team or how the whole thing hangs together when onboarding new engineers can be difficult and time consuming. (read expensive)

Cloud network security diagrams are a visual representation of an organization's cloud infrastructure that provides an overview of the security and data protection measures in place. In today's digital age, where cloud computing has become the norm for many organizations, it is crucial to have a secure and protected cloud environment.

If you are responsible for cloud infrastructure there is every chance the importance of containing or reducing cloud costs this year will become a focus of your organisation.

A CTO needs a clear line of sight to the networks and network resources they are responsible for, especially if they that infrastructure is cloud based.

2022 was a big year for Hava, several key appointments saw the team almost double in size. We have spent a lot of time thinking about how people use Hava and how Hava can help make cloud practitioner's day to day work lives easier.  We use Hava internally ourselves to document and monitor Hava so we understand how it makes our lives easier too!

Who is creating your cloud infrastructure diagrams in 2023?

It is important for businesses and their engineering staff to have a good understanding of how their cloud infrastructure works and how it hangs together. One way to help with this understanding is to create diagrams that illustrate the various components and how they fit together. In this article, we will discuss the benefits of automating the creation of your cloud computing diagrams.

Cloud security is a critical concern for organizations that rely on cloud-based infrastructure and services to store, process, and transmit sensitive data. One key aspect of maintaining effective cloud security is regularly conducting security audits to identify and address potential vulnerabilities and risks.

In these days of rising business and energy costs we can ultimately expect to see the burden on AWS data centers passed on to customers sooner or later. So keeping on top of your AWS cloud spend has never been more important.

When you connect a cloud account to Hava, you will end up with a set of diagrams for every VPC or virtual network discovered.

AWS Reachability Analyzer is a tool that allows users to test the reachability of their Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources from different locations. This is useful for ensuring that the resources are accessible from the locations where they are needed, and for identifying potential connectivity issues that may affect the performance of the services.

Team Hava is pleased to announce that version 2.1.522 containing a significant number of new features as well as security and performance enhancements is now generally available.

When you are managing multiple cloud based networks the chances are there are multiple cloud accounts to look after and these may well be from different vendors.

AWS are always quick to point out what they refer to as the shared responsibility security model.

Why automate cloud computing System Architecture Diagrams?

Networking is at the core of just about everything in the cloud. Some elements of your compute infrastructure need to be publicly accessible, while others like databases or transactional applications are better off remaining private.

Modern GitOps practices are based around the use of automations to deploy and manage cloud environments. One of the major players in this space is HashiCorp who's Terraform application is used by developers, DevOps and engineers around the world to deploy cloud infrastructure using code.

If you work with AWS at any scale, you will understand the benefits of accurate network documentation. Whether it's trying to get to grips with a network belonging to a new client, or getting a better understanding of exactly what you have running in your own cloud accounts, an accurate network topology diagram goes a long way to quickly understanding the state of play.

Following on from our post on the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials Compute topic, in this post we’ll look at module 3 which concerns itself with the global infrastructure AWS has in place to deliver cloud services and the reliability built in using the various regions and availability zones to provide both redundancy and lower latency.

Did you know your Hava account supports MFA. Are you using it?  MFA provides an optional layer of account log in security, but you probably already know that. In addition to your user name and password, you will be required to enter a one time code generated by a supported TOTP authentication application like Google Authenticator or Authy.

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) 

The AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials is a course and examination designed to help you understand the essentials of AWS.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

As more companies turn to the cloud to host critical business applications, mass cloud adoption brings with it a new set of challenges.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

If you have adopted a micro-services approach to application development, you'll understand the benefits of diagrams showing the status and connections of the configured services.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

When you are building cloud based infrastructure or are handed a new account or existing project to manage, the very first thing you are likely to ask yourself is what does the infrastructure look like? What resources are running? Where are they running? What does the security look like?

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

Amazon Athena is a service that enables you to perform SQL queries on data held in amazon S3. There are no complex ETL pipelines to create which makes Athena perfect for anyone with SQL skills to analyse large amounts of data without having to extract and prepare data held in S3.

Hava is excited to announce a major overhaul of the available plans and pricing tiers to ensure you only need to pay for the features you are using.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

Auto scaling AWS resources in your cloud infrastructure protects the performance of your applications when they are placed under heavy traffic or processing loads.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed data warehouse solution from AWS that allows you to store and query large volumes of analytical data. It is fast and scalable providing a 10x performance lift over other data warehouses by using machine learning and parallel processing of queries against columnar storage held on very high performance disk.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

When you are deploying cloud infrastructure you typically want to validate that everything went according to plan.

If you are managing multiple cloud accounts or maybe hundreds or tens of thousands like a managed service provider (MSP), the ability to find particular resources or specific resource types can be difficult.

Hava is excited to announce the general availability of the Hava Github Action on the GitHub marketplace.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

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?

The AWS CAF was created by AWS professional services to help businesses create and implement a comprehensive digital transformation plan that complies to AWS best practice. The framework takes advantage of the lessons learned by AWS pro services and partners helping thousands of customers successfully transition workloads to the AWS cloud.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

Hava are excited to announce a number of significant enhancements to the Azure diagrams that are automatically generated when you connect your Microsoft Azure accounts to hava.io or your self-hosted Hava app.

When you are building cloud based 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.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

You may already be aware that Hava auto generates interactive network topology and container workload diagrams for AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Kubernetes. 

AWS Skill Builder is a repository of over 700 training lessons to help you learn AWS and refine your knowledge of AWS services and improve your skills so you can put them into practice or apply the knowledge during the many AWS certifications.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

AWS Global Accelerator is a service that allows you to route traffic to your applications using the AWS global network instead of the internet. The internet can be congested and AWS claim that by using their private network infrastructure you can improve the connection speed and performance by as much as 60%.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

Cloudscape Design System, is an open source solution from AWS for building intuitive, engaging, and inclusive user experiences at scale. Cloudscape consists of an extensive set of guidelines to create web applications, along with the design resources and front-end components to help streamline implementation.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, Pulumi, or other tools has become the industry standard for deploying and managing infrastructure in the cloud. And when documenting your infrastructure deployments, it is useful to always include a diagram so your peers can quickly understand the architecture of the IaC deployment.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

There are a massive number of reasons why Google Cloud users are turning to Pub/Sub to manage messaging and data movement between applications. This can be data analytics streams, real time events or application events that are ingested by other services. Pub/Sub is also used as messaging oriented middleware to queue tasks for applications or services based on user interaction or server events.

Hava is a cloud based application that automatically generates cloud network topology diagrams for AWS, Azure, GCP and Kubernetes clusters and provides powerful search capabilities to help you locate resources across hundreds of cloud accounts fast.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

AWS security hub is a cloud security posture service that automates security checks and brings security alerts into a central location. The service performs best practice validation against your security settings, aggregates alerts and automates remediation of non compliant security settings.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

We're huge fans of productivity tools and applications, especially ones that save time and help keep things organised. While we are all about saving you time diagramming your cloud infrastructure, finding resources quickly and automating the discovery of everything you have running in the cloud, there are some great applications out there dedicated to organising your work life, managing projects and teams and keeping on top of whatever you have going on.

Hava is pleased to announce the general availability of enhanced diagram embeds

When you have an incredibly useful resource, like an accurate up to date cloud network topology diagram, the chances are at some point you are going to want to share it.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

Amazon QuickSight is a popular cloud native serverless business intelligence (BI) service from AWS.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

When you work with AWS cloud architecture, you almost certainly understand the importance of documenting your AWS VPCs and container clusters using network architecture diagrams.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

When you are building applications and deploying them using containers, getting a visual representation of what pods or tasks are running is an invaluable tool to check that everything is as it should be.

One of the key roles of cloud network managers is containing costs. It is so easy to add to networks and scale resources in the never ending quest for lower latency and better application performance.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

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. 

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

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.

Whether you are building a new application or migrating legacy on premise workloads to AWS it's good to know what compute services are available and which ones might be a good choice for your specific application or workload.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

AWS availability zones are on the whole extremely robust, however they are not completely immune to outages. Geographically they are subject to natural and technical disasters that can affect any data center, like floods, prolonged power outages, fires or someone inadvertently slicing through a fibre optic cable.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

As part of our ongoing quest to help you understand what your cloud infrastructure and security posture looks like through easy to understand diagrams and visualisations, several enhancements to the current security view diagrams have been released that deliver even more clarity to potentially complex visualisations.

In the latest release, Hava users running GKE workloads will see container diagrams auto generated in their environments dashboard. This new functionality closely follows the addition of direct import of stand alone kubernetes clusters.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

So imagine your worst nightmare. The cloud based application you have just inherited management and support for has just crashed. The support lines are lit up like a Christmas tree, the support ticket system is having a meltdown and everyone is looking at you for a solution.

Could your team show you with any confidence what systems and resources you have running in the cloud. Could they do that today, or right now.

Hava adds Kubernetes Cluster Diagrams

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

Whether you are developing cloud based applications or accessing lots of different corporate applications and web properties daily, there is a clear advantage to streamlining your security profile using SSO

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

How to find resources in AWS

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

At the heart of AWS managed services is the provision of services that facilitate AWS cloud adoption, by assisting customers to move from on-premises hardware and software to cloud based infrastructure.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

If your application integrates or handles credit card processing, it's a good idea to ensure your network meets PCI DSS standards.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

When you are building applications or managing infrastructure on AWS, being able to visualise what you have built in diagram form has several major advantages,

Most developers and engineers working with cloud infrastructure will agree that a well laid out network topology diagram is an essential tool when either communicating how the network is built, or for use when tracking down the reason for an application outage or performance dip.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

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?

Amazon Lightsail is a cloud service from AWS that allows you to deploy pre configured Windows and Linux server stacks that you can manage from an intuitive management console.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

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.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

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.

AWS Backup has recently added S3 to the range of supported services in AWS Backup which means you can now use backup to automate the backup of objects and files stored in Amazon S3.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

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.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

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.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

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.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

If you are building or supporting cloud infrastructure built on AWS, GCP or Azure it is now extremely simple to get a live graphical snapshot of your cloud network topology.

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.

AWS Organisations is a free service that allows you to programmatically add and remove AWS accounts and group together AWS accounts into organisational units.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

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

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

When you are building on AWS or working with applications built on AWS as a development or operations engineer you already appreciate the value of a well laid out network topology diagram that accurately represents what resources you have configured in your AWS accounts.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

If you are building solutions on Microsoft Azure, you'll almost certainly want to know your network has been built in line with your design which often leads to the need to create Azure diagrams.

When you have accurate and up to date network topology 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. 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 create them. 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. Engineers rarely have the time or motivation to sit down and create Azure diagrams. They generally 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 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.

AWS Virtual Private Cloud instances  (VPC’s) allow you to run workloads and store data in the cloud.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

A VPC peering connection is a networking connection between two VPCs that enables you to route traffic between the two VPCs using private IPv4 or IPv6 addresses. Instances in either VPC can communicate with each other as if they are within the same network. You can create a VPC peering connection between your own VPCs, or with a VPC in another AWS account. The VPCs can be in different AWS regions which is also known as an inter-region VPC peering connection.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) allows you to safely store, retrieve and secure your files on the AWS ecosystem. Storage is segmented into repositories much like a traditional folder that are referred to as buckets.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

If you have been working with AWS VPCs for any length of time, you understand the importance of documenting your AWS VPCs using network topology diagrams. Not only do they visually represent the construction of your AWS network, they also speed up the on-boarding of new team members and external consultants the also help you to quickly identify what the network should look like in the middle of an outage.

After a well earned break, our talented developers have been busy putting the finishing touches to a number of new features and enhancements to make your Hava diagrams more detailed and flexible.

AWS cloud WAN allows you to connect your on premise networks at your company locations, data centers and AWS VPCs together using the AWS global network backbone without having to use the internet.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

When your mind turns to cloud network diagrams often Microsoft Visio will be the first thing that springs to mind. That's not surprising, given the popularity of this accomplished desktop flow chart/drawing application.

When your organisation has hundreds or thousands of users, the logistics of controlling the deployment of software and services can be a complex and time consuming task.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

Amazon DevOps guru is a machine learning power service that helps you improve your application’s operational performance and availability by detecting anomalies that fall outside normal operating patterns.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

When you are working with Azure cloud computing infrastructure in your role as a DevOps engineer, there are many benefits to creating and maintaining accurate Microsoft Azure diagrams.

You can effectively communicate your Azure network design to both technical DevOps staff, developers and also management where necessary.  If you are onboarding new DevOps engineers, or engaging external consultants, you can bring them up to speed very quickly with a well laid out accurate infrastructure diagram.

If you are taking on a new client, application or project, having access to detailed infrastructure documentation is a massive advantage when trying to understand exactly what is running where. Back in our cloud consulting days, diagramming a new client's infrastructure was always the first job in the on-boarding process. It was often time consuming, laborious but necessary in establishing exactly what was going on prior to starting work on improving or redesigning infrastructure.

One of the more advanced features of the Hava business plan is the ability to create teams.

Amazon Route 53 is a scalable and highly available DNS service that translates human readable website names like www.hava.io into the numeric IP address location of the target website host (13.35.145.107) or a private VPC or application endpoint.

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

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