Cloudcraft is known for their isometric AWS diagrams and often one of the tools used to depict the layout of your cloud environments, along with Lucidchart and Draw.io. We all need to start somewhere with our network diagrams, whether it's on a whiteboard, in a drawing tool or in a drag and drop builder.
These diagramming tools are great for the design stage, however as the cloud-native architectures of today continue to evolve, the idea of continually updating diagrams to reflect what's currently running becomes a more impossible task.
As IT environments start incorporating dynamic behaviour such as auto-scaling and rapid changes via CI systems, a manually updated diagram simple cannot capture the current state of an environment. Hava is about solving the problems we face with static diagrams, automatically generating diagrams from the source of truth, eliminating human error and capturing the changes over time.
Automated Network Diagrams
AWS
Cloudcraft and Hava both allow you to connect directly to your AWS accounts through an IAM read-only role to import your data. Cloudcraft offers the Live Layout feature to import components that are displayed on the diagram allowing the user to edit the positioning of existing infrastructure and network topology.
Azure
Hava also has the ability to connect and import environments from your Microsoft Azure accounts, and by default will create an environment for each resource group that is discovered. Cloudcraft currently doesn't have the ability to import Azure infrastructure.
Diagram Visualization
Both Cloudcraft and Hava show connections between resources and resource names, with the ability to toggle them on and off. Cloudcraft, as a design tool, offers a little more flexibility around the renaming of resources and their positioning on the diagram.
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Cloudcraft
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Exporting
Cloudcraft is limited to exporting your diagrams in PNG, PDF and SVG formats only.
Within the Cloudcraft application you have the ability to export your diagrams to PNG, PDF, SVG format, and you can also export via their API to export images or download an inventory of your AWS resources from a linked account as JSON.
Within the Cloudcraft application you have the ability to export your diagrams to PNG, PDF, SVG format, and you can also export via their API to export images or download an inventory of your AWS resources from a linked account as JSON.
Hava allows you to export your diagram in a variety of image formats, but also supports exporting to the VSDX format to allow editing in Visio. Most importantly, Hava offers the ability to download your environment in a JSON or CSV format, letting you inspect the data that Hava uses to generate it's diagrams and giving you the opportunity to integrate and extend Hava's output for your own purposes.
Security Views
Cloudcraft shows off basic security group information which is great for a quick glance, Hava has multiple ways to visualize and diagnose your VPC security groups.
Hava's security group view allows you to visualize the configured traffic flows between a collection of Security Group rules and other external resources. Our infrastructure diagrams allow you to highlight the resources that a security group or route table configuration applies to by simply hovering your cursor above the security group name.
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Security Group View
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Security Group Highlighting
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Cost & Budget Estimation
Cloudcraft and Hava help forecast costs of your existing and proposed infrastructure, Cloudcraft allows you to break it down to daily, weekly and monthly costing and has the ability to change the currency, giving you a slightly more comprehensive view of your overall costs.
Hava currently offers an environment-centric view of the costs associated with running your particular application. This cost is an estimated figure based on the AWS and Azure resource pricing data to show you approximately what your environment's configuration would cost to run each month.
Versioning
One of Hava's most important features is it's ability to retain and construct versions of your diagrams as the resources within them change or update. As your environment evolves or changes state over time, Hava will automatically capture these changes. When viewing your environment in the Hava viewer you will be able to switch between the current and previous revisions.
Imagine Hava showing a git repository-like view of your environment and resources throughout their history. To be able to animate your infrastructure diagrams and illustrate how it's morphed over time. This is the first of many features to be built around this versioning capability, with many more exciting ones to come.
Quick Comparison
This table should allow you to quickly evaluate the difference in features between Hava and Cloudcraft at a glance.
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Cloudcraft
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Hava
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| AWS |
✓
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✓
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| Azure |
Χ
|
✓
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| Auto Sync |
✓
|
✓
|
| Export diagram (PNG/PDF) |
✓
|
✓
|
| Export data (JSON) | ✓ |
✓
|
| Export data [CSV) | Χ | ✓ |
| Export to Visio |
Χ
|
✓
|
| Cost Estimation |
✓
|
✓
|
| Custom Environment |
Χ
|
✓
|
| Infrastructure Diagram |
✓
|
✓
|
| Security Diagrams |
Χ
|
✓ |
| Isometric View |
✓
|
✓
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| Drawing/Editing Options |
✓
|
Χ
|
| Versioning |
Χ
|
✓
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Make The Switch
The main difference between Cloudcraft and Hava, outside of Cloudcraft's default 3D isometric view, depends on the stage of your IT environments lifecycle. When you're at the beginning of your project and simply designing your intended architecture then Cloudcraft's features allow you to mock up what your future architecture might look like. The live sync feature allows you a head-start to import and view your existing resources, but this requires hands-on effort from your team to create and update the diagrams.
Hava excels at creating hands-off diagrams and documentation of your environments, where no manual effort is required in order to discover what you're currently running within your cloud provider. It's real focus is on usefully generating network and architecture diagrams straight from the source of truth (your cloud provider), requiring no human effort to create and update, meaning that you can be confident that what you see on a diagram actually matches what's running at a particular point in time.
While you might end up using Cloudcraft during the initial stages of application development, we encourage you to check out Hava once you've got something running in the cloud. Our automated diagrams will allow you to discover, diagnose and document your running system without any effort required on your part.
