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

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.

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.

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.

The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is a downloadable tool that you can use to manage your AWS services.

Amazon CloudWatch is an AWS service designed to help you monitor the performance and health of your AWS resources and applications. CloudWatch initiates communication with other services in response to events or schedules. CloudWatch will also aggregate logs from other services and aggregate notifications and alarms from groups of services onto a customised dashboard.

A large part of managing cloud infrastructure is making sure everything is running as expected so that your applications operate and access data efficiently while avoiding over specified resources that cost more than is necessary.

Ec2 instances are the virtual machines provided by AWS that you can rent to run your application workloads. They can can vary from powerful instances with hundreds of processors capable of processing vast amounts of data quickly, down to small micro instances suitable for running microservices.