Building Azure Cloud Diagrams with Hava.io: Streamlining the Visualization Process

When you are working with complex cloud architecture, the automation of cloud deployment diagrams is not just a convenience—it's a strategic advantage. Automated diagrams provide DevOps teams with up-to-date visual representations of their cloud infrastructure, crucial for efficient management, troubleshooting, and scaling of applications. This article explores the importance of automating cloud deployment diagrams and how it revolutionizes cloud management for AWS, Azure and GCP engineers.

Cloud Deployment Diagrams for DevOps: Enhancing Collaboration and Efficiency with Hava.io

For organizations leveraging Google Cloud Platform (GCP), maintaining an accurate and up-to-date visualization of their cloud architecture can be both challenging and time-consuming. Automating this process can significantly enhance efficiency, compliance, and security. Hava.io, a leading tool in cloud visualization, offers a powerful solution for GCP Diagram Automation, ensuring that they remain current without requiring manual updates. Here’s how Hava can transform the management of GCP environments.

When your systems are built using cloud computing, maintaining rigorous audit trails and compliance records is not just good practice—it's often a regulatory requirement. Historical cloud diagrams play a crucial role in these audits, providing a visual timeline of changes, configurations, and adaptations within a cloud environment. Leveraging tools like Hava.io, which specializes in automated cloud visualization and versioning, can significantly streamline the audit process and ensure compliance.

In modern cloud environments, keeping track of architecture changes is more crucial than ever. Organizations are constantly updating their cloud infrastructure to improve efficiency, security, and compliance.

Maintaining an up-to-date and accurate representation of cloud infrastructure is vital. Version control in cloud diagramming plays a crucial role in achieving this, offering numerous benefits that enhance the efficiency, security, and reliability of cloud operations. Here's an exploration of why implementing version control in cloud diagramming is beneficial.

1. Enhanced Troubleshooting and Operational Continuity

One of the primary benefits of using version control in cloud diagramming is the ability to troubleshoot effectively. When issues arise—be it performance drops, security breaches, or service disruptions—engineers can refer to previous versions of cloud diagrams to quickly pinpoint changes that may have caused the problem.

For any team building cloud infrastructure, maintaining up-to-date diagrams can be a daunting task.

Seeing what has been deployed in your cloud accounts serves a number of purposes :

• You can ensure what you planned to deploy actually got deployed
• You can pick up a new environment and see what is running at a glance
• Your engineers, architects and Ops team are all instantly on the same page

The problem is cloud deployment diagrams take forever to draw, and even more effort to keep current and accurate.

However, with Hava.io you can automate your cloud infrastructure diagrams, ensuring you always have the most current view of your cloud environment.

While Hava.io out of the box maps out all your cloud environments, you can use the built in customer search to fine tune the diagrams to show you exactly what you are interested in.

Custom search is more than just a feature; it's a solution to the common problem of managing large and complex cloud environments. With Hava.io, you can build custom diagrams and quickly locate resources from hundreds of cloud accounts. This tool is especially useful when you need to find an individual resource, an IP address, or a VPC running in your managed environments.

One of the key benefits of Hava.io's custom search is its ability to create custom diagrams that self-update. This means you always have the most current view of your cloud infrastructure. Additionally, you can set up alerts for changes in your custom diagrams, keeping you informed and proactive.

But the power of custom search doesn't stop there. With Hava.io, you can also perform deep searches that not only bring back the resources that match your search but also anything connected to those resources. This is particularly useful when you want to see all the resources connected to a particular instance in your VPC or virtual network.

In essence, Hava.io's custom search is a powerful tool that can transform your cloud management experience. It's about turning a sprawling cloud landscape into a navigable map, tailored to your needs. With Hava.io, you can harness the full potential of custom search, taking control of your cloud infrastructure like never before.

Ready to automate your cloud infrastructure diagrams? Dive into our detailed blog post to learn more about this game-changing custom diagram and multi cloud single point search tool.

AWS ARCHITECTURE DIAGRAMS

There are a number of Hava diagrams that can prove useful to your engineering and DevOps team. These include an AWS Infrastructure diagram like this:

The above diagram example logically lays out all the resources discovered when an AWS account is connected to Hava's AWS Network Diagram Generator. The main VPC denoted by the green border, is surrounded by associated resources like internet and VPN gateways, S3 Buckets, VPC endpoints, VPC peering connections, Elastic Beanstalk environments and so forth.

Within the VPC, the configured availability zones (AZs) are set out in columns that contain the individual subnets set up in those AZs.  All the resource instances contained in each subnet are visualized, as are any load balancers routing traffic to the various subnets.

When you have a diagram automatically created from configuration data, now you can interrogate of each of the resources to see the settings and associations related to it. By clicking on any of the individual instance icons, the attribute pane on the right then displays all the known details related to the resource.  Something that simply isn't possible with manually created drag-and-drop diagrams.

Automating the diagram build using an AWS Network Diagram Generator can also reveal resources you are paying for, but may not be aware of.  Long forgotten database instances and sometimes entire dev or test environments are regularly discovered by this automation process. One of our clients discovered a database instance that was unused and costing close to $3k per month, and had been for over 3 years!

CUSTOM AWS NETWORK TOPOLOGY DIAGRAM

There is always somewhat of a compromise when it comes to automatically generated documentation. The way that Hava discovers and builds diagrams is based at a VPC level. If more than one VPC is detected in your AWS cloud account, then one diagram set per VPC is created.

You may however want to combine two or more VPCs onto a single diagram, for instance if they both relate to the same project or application.  This can be achieved using the custom query search function built into hava.io.

AWS NETWORK TOPOLOGY DIAGRAM GENERATOR

This custom query would create a new 'on-the-fly' custom diagram containing the two nominated AWS VPCs specified in the search.  You would then have the ability to save this diagram so it is retained in your dashboard until you choose to delete it.  As with all other diagrams generated by Hava, your custom AWS infrastructure diagram would keep itself up to date and retain a version history every time a resource change is detected.

RUNNING Cloud COMPONENTS DIAGRAM

Typically it is just not practical to include every single component onto an AWS network diagram. Take for instance network interfaces, volumes or WAF Rules. In a large network with hundreds or maybe thousands of these non essential components, trying to map out every single component would most likely make the diagram unreadable, or certainly too rammed full of unimportant resources to easily recognise the core components.

However, that's not to say you don't need to know about them.

Hava solves this issue by providing detailed components list that lists out every single resource detected.

This comprehensive list of resources can also be sorted and exported along with estimated monthly costs so you can see at a glance what resources are costing you the most money. This detailed view is also interactive. Selecting a resource on the diagram will reveal all the known settings and associations that resource has.

AWS SECURITY GROUP DIAGRAMS

Another benefit of automating the discovery of your AWS environment diagrams with Hava is the ability to capture and visualize security group, traffic and open port details.

AWS SECURITY ARCHITECTURE DIAGRAM

With the Hava security group diagram you can view all of your configured security groups with the open ports overlaid to enable an instant visual snapshot of the traffic flow, ingress and egress points. The security group diagram being interactive ensures you can select a particular security group on the diagram and view important information relating to the group, like the connected resources, ingress and egress ports, IP addresses and associated tags.

Cloud ARCHITECTURE DIAGRAM VERSION COMPARISON

Hava continuously scans your cloud architecture and when changes are detected a new diagram set is automatically generated. The superseded diagrams are not discarded or overwritten. Instead they are moved into version history. Still fully interactive.

What this means is you can view your cloud architecture at any point in time and also leverage Hava's revision comparison (Diff Diagrams) to quickly identify what has been added or removed between the two diagram dates.

So you can easily identify all the changes made since your last compliance audit, or see what changed yesterday that is causing unexpected network or application errors.

Cloud ARCHITECTURE MONITORING

While diff diagrams are super helpful in diagnosing changes after the fact, you may want to keep on top of changes as they happen.

Hava's architecture monitoring alerts will let you know the minute a change is detected. You simply nominate the environment you wish to monitor and add a group of recipients to receive the alerts. When a change is detected like the addition or removal of a resource, Hava will send each recipient a diff diagram showing the changes.

Now you and your security team can be across every change as it happens so you can assess and take action if required.

ENVIRONMENT DIAGRAM NOTES

For every architecture diagram generated you have the ability to add text comments. This serves as a rolling dialogue your team can contribute to that may better explain elements of the diagram or bigger picture concepts related to the diagram.

Notes are accessed from the accordion menu within the attribute pane.

New notes are added to the top of the list so they are stored in chronological order.

AUTOMATED cloud DIAGRAM UPDATES

Finally, your documentation is only useful if it is accurate. It is quite possible to spend weeks manually constructing network topology documentation only to have it rendered useless by a minor change to your network configuration.

In the middle of an outage or network incident that has taken down your application, being able to quickly establish what should be running is crucial.

Built into Hava is an auto-sync function that polls connected data sources and automatically updates diagram sets when changes are detected.  This means your diagrams are always current and up to date. The superseded diagram sets aren't discarded however. They are placed into a version history that enables you to pull up older diagrams in the same fully interactive format.

This allows you to quickly and visually identify changes to your cloud network topology, so you can easily compare a previously working set of network resources with the current configuration to see what's missing .

It also allows you to demonstrate the status of your network at any point in history. This can be invaluable during a pci compliance audit or insurance claim should your network design ever be called into question.  

EXPORTING GENERATED AWS  DIAGRAMS

Native AWS architecture diagrams created by Hava are the nearest we've seen to the examples and recommendations provided by AWS.  These are great to view and interrogate via the interactive dashboard, however sometimes you'll need to pull a set of diagrams for audit purposes or for management or sales presentations.

Hava's built-in export function allows you to do this in a number of formats.

CSV, VSDX, JSON, PDF and PNG

EDITING AWS NETWORK DIAGRAMS

Should you want to manipulate or embellish your Hava generated diagrams, exporting to VSDX format and using Visio, draw.io or any VSDX compatible drawing package will allow you to edit your diagrams as required.  

Should you not have access to Visio but would like to try this out, try opening one of your exported VSDX files in draw.io

Getting Hava to do the bulk of the heavy lifting by initially generating accurate diagrams based on what is actually configured and running in your cloud environment enables you to access a base diagram ready to edit which will save you hours or possibly days preparing management reports or upgrade plans.

The financial overhead of maintaining compliance can be substantial for any organization. IT audit tools like Hava.io are not just a means to ensure adherence to standards; they are also a cost-effective solution to the traditionally resource and labour-intensive compliance process.

In the dynamic world of cloud infrastructure, managing costs can be a challenging task. However, with Hava.io's custom search, you can gain a clear view of your cloud expenses, enabling you to manage your costs more effectively.

Custom search is more than just a feature; it's a solution to the common problem of managing large and complex cloud environments. With Hava.io, you can build custom diagrams and quickly locate resources from hundreds of cloud accounts. This tool is especially useful when you need to find an individual resource, an IP address, or a VPC running in your managed environments in your AWS, Azure or GCP environments.

One of the key benefits of Hava.io's custom search is its ability to create custom diagrams that self-update. This means you always have the most current view of your cloud infrastructure. But what makes it even more powerful is the ability to view estimated costs for a resource, VPC or an entire region. Every resource carries an estimated cost based on the cloud vendor price guidance, which is displayed in the attribute pane on the right-hand side of the Hava infrastructure diagrams and also against each resource on the list view.