Christian Larsen

Cloud Vigilante

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

@dazzag24 You can! Perspective discovers resources within your account(s) regardless of what created them.

There's no need to have used any IaC tooling (although that's still a good idea) to generate the diagrams.

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

My team at #AWS just released an update to AWS Perspective, our tool to automatically visualise your #Cloud workloads.

This new release focuses heavily on cost related features that allow you to better understand your cloud billing.

Check it out!
https://t.co/3SGVHiYYs1

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

@aprooks Yep! Cross account and cross region are supported.

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

Along with a huge number of quality of life improvements and squashed bugs!

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

There's also a new Grouped Resources option when building your architecture diagrams. It lets you remove edges and see a less cluttered view of your workload.

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

@aDataArchitect We've had similar feedback about adding your own metadata and groupings to the diagrams.

Please feel free to raise a feature request with your use cases if this is something you'd like to see!
https://t.co/qHdQkQ0bEY

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

My team at #AWS just published AWS Perspective, a tool to automatically visualise your Cloud workloads and the relationships within as up-to-date architecture diagrams.

Perspective can also visualise indicative costing data for your workloads.

https://t.co/356C2Uduly

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

@mmars We're looking into further optimising the cost of the solution, but doing so may be a larger effort that won't happen soon.

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

@wirjo @jeffbarr Yep! All the same icons etc. should also come across with the export as well.

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

@wirjo @jeffbarr Not at the moment, but feel free to add that as a feature request!

At the moment you can export to JSON, CSV, PNG and DRAWIO.

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

@jdub We had a bingo card to fill. 😉

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

@jdub We built this using all the same interfaces you have. (It's open source).

I can empathise. 😀

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

@0xdabbad00 Absolutely. We've a lot of ideas in this space. Flow logs would also allow us to do fun things with the edges like enhance thickness or similar depending on traffic. Highlighting security diffs like you mention is also something we've spoken about.

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

@0xdabbad00 We're also using cytoscape. This is still a UI/UX challenge. We've intentionally tried to coax users to focus on a particular resource and expand the graph from there, rather than say "show me all the things" and narrow down. We are also working on automatically collapsing etc.

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

@elrowan It's not as complicated as it looks, but your point is valid! We use Neptune to maintain a graph of all the resources and relationships -- that's what we use to explore the diagrams.

The biggest challenges have been in UI/UX and we haven't solved them all.

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

@0xdabbad00 We rely heavily on AWS Config as a data source but supplement it with our own data where resources are not supported. Likewise we use Config relationship data (and more) to draw edges on the graph. We're investigating more options like parsing VPC flow logs right now.

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

@tmclaughbos Unfortunately not, but we've had a lot of interest in this space.

One of our initial design principles was for Perspective to be a "read only" tool (but Perspective does write things to itself).

Feel free to add an item for investigation to our backlog:
https://t.co/WX1IxoeSS2

[Christian Larsen @toksvaeth]

@ShortJared You can import multiple accounts/regions into a single Perspective installation and visualise the resources within.

Unfortunately we don't (yet) visualise cross account relationships.