A Cloud Architecture Diagram paints a thousand words.

We’ve all heard the cliche “A picture paints a thousand words”, but there is real value in using images to explain complex technical information.

This week's roundup of notable cloud news.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) have launched a re-designed set of diagram icons, the first version release was for AWS re:invent 2018, with the official public release on the 2nd of February 2019. Hava now supports diagrams using the new icon set, so you can discover, diagram, diagnose, and document your environments straight from the source of truth with a familiar style. 

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.

Canalys estimates cloud infrastructure services spend reached US$20 billion in Q2 2018. The top three cloud providers account for 57% market share.

AWS security groups act as a virtual firewall for your EC2 instances to control inbound and outbound traffic.

"Security groups act at the instance level, not the subnet level. Therefore, each instance in a subnet in your VPC could be assigned to a different set of security groups." -  AWS Documentation

There is no doubt that as we continue to move further into cloud networking and infrastructure our environments are evolving daily. This rapid pace of change is failing to keep up with the expectation that your team knows "how it works" and "what it looks like". Keeping network diagrams up to date is often the last thing on most engineers mind, until the time you need them which in some cases is too late.

Manual creation and updating of diagrams are tedious and time-consuming and not that effective with continuous change. These days we have the ability to automate the process of generating and drawing a diagram, getting the information straight from the source of truth.

So you’ve got approval to hire a consultant on a six-month contract to fast track your project. You’ve found the perfect consultancy with proven success in everything you need to implement. Your Scope of Work (SOW) has been signed off on and your consultant starts in a week. Hoorah!

You want the project to be a resounding success, right?

Onboarding your cloud consultant properly is the most critical thing to you can do to maximize your ROI. They have limited time to deliver you results, not being prepared means your consultant sits idle, and that costs you money.

Sydney’s wild weather brought down an availability zone in AWS’s AP-SOUTHEAST-2 Region on Sunday night.

Websites went down, customer service calls went up, twitter went nuts, engineers scrambled to find work arounds and management started asking “Why?”. 

If your website crashed, you know by now that it’s probably because your application wasn’t designed for region failure.

One outage should not be reason for you to start thinking that the cloud isn’t right for you, or that you should move service providers. But it should make you revisit your architecture. 

Failure in cloud services is inevitable regardless of your provider. Outages happen so you must design for failure. Your actual infrastructure availability is irrelevant to your application availability. 100% uptime should be achievable even when your cloud provider has an outage regardless of its size.