
Show HN: Cloud Maker – Rapidly create cloud architecture diagrams - t4l0s
https://cloudmaker.ai#
======
arkadiyt
Gave it a try. Here's my feedback in no particular order:

\- I couldn't get into my account to start playing around for a while because
your email verification is flagged as spam

\- Basic resources like AWS Security Groups are missing. The product seems to
heavily lean towards Azure

\- I like that you provide an infinite grid for free (cloudcraft only has this
on their paid plan)

\- I don't like the clutter of having all the Azure/GCP/AWS resources grouped
by type ("Compute", "Databases", etc). 99% of companies are single-cloud and
it would be more convenient if I could filter down to just AWS

\- Lots of UI buttons are missing tooltips - I have no idea what your icons
mean

\- There's no account editing, you can't change your password & there's no 2fa
support

~~~
softwarelimits
> I don't like the clutter of having all the Azure/GCP/AWS resources grouped
> by type ("Compute", "Databases", etc). 99% of companies are single-cloud and
> it would be more convenient if I could filter down to just AWS

But it would be very cool to have details abstracted in a way that it would be
easier to build architectures for several cloud providers with one diagram.

~~~
jcims
This sounds great in theory but I would be interested to see if anyone has
successfully abstracted the provider out if their architecture.

In my experience the only way to do this is to limit your service to
leveraging the lowest common features of services that are common to each
privider.

~~~
toomanybeersies
Really depends on what you're doing. If you have something like a simple Rails
stack it's fairly trivial.

From experiences it's easy enough to abstract NoSQL (i.e. AWS DynamoDB and GCP
Firestore) and Serverless functions (AWS Lambda and GCP Cloud Functions),
although you need to write abstractions for them in your code.

I have no experience with ML, but I'd imagine that's where it gets a lot
harder to abstract these out.

Both Microsoft [1] and Google [2] provide tables with their equivalents to AWS
services.

[1] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/aws-
prof...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/aws-
professional/services)

[2] [https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/map-aws-google-cloud-
plat...](https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/map-aws-google-cloud-platform)

~~~
antpls
> Serverless functions (AWS Lambda and GCP Cloud Functions)

Look for severless benchmarks on your favorite search engine. The performance
and trade-off for what seems to be the same service are not homogeneous across
providers. This could completely change your costs, and then your
architecture. To compare cloud providers or build multi-providers cloud, you
have to be careful at comparing apples and apples, or build some kind of
simulator first

------
robot
I think this is an idea with great potential. Making it work seamlessly would
be a challenge.

For example: Elastic Beanstalk for NodeJS gives you a good starting point for
a web backend. However, I had to hand-edit the EBS environment configurations
to add Redis, Postgres, force HTTPS, and so on. I'd love to add a CI/CD
pipeline when I find the time.

Could I do these with your tool? Probably not today. It would be awesome to be
able to drag and drop gateways, firewalls, set in/out ports. Conceptually this
is all one should need to get an EBS set up.

~~~
t4l0s
That's the plan - the next feature we're working on will allow you to deploy
the architecture you've defined in your diagram.

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alephnan
Cloud providers should auto-generate these kinds of graphs and make this
available as part of their Web UI.

~~~
ForHackernews
I'm sure they will, if it looks like 3rd party services are making money at
it.

This is the problem with building your product on one of these platforms:
you're just doing their market research for them for free.

~~~
twistiti
Or maybe even offer to acquire you?

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t4l0s
We’re building a visual design platform for cloud infrastructure. We’ve just
released our public preview which allows you to diagram solutions for AWS,
Azure and GCP for free. Included out of the box are the latest icons for each
platform and we offer a streamlined experience for creating cloud
infrastructure diagrams versus generic drawing tools.

We’d love to hear your feedback!

~~~
zarmin
I've always wanted a infrastructure diagram tool that would actually create
the architecture using my AWS account. How feasible is that?

~~~
PeterBarrett
There is also cloundcraft.co [1] which I have been using for a year or so now
and would recommend.

1\. [https://cloudcraft.co/](https://cloudcraft.co/)

~~~
jhabdas
CloudCraft is quite nice, I first saw it used here [^1]. Seeing diagrams drawn
out in perspective is extremely useful.

[1]: [https://serifandsemaphore.io/how-to-host-wordpress-like-a-
bo...](https://serifandsemaphore.io/how-to-host-wordpress-like-a-
boss-b5993fcfbd8e)

------
easytiger
When i click "Sign Up Free", you go to a page that only has "Sign In" options.

You then have to click (i did in a UI bruteforcing attempt) "Sign In with
Email" to find a tiny font saying "Do you need an account"

It's like you are trying to hide email sign ups.

~~~
t4l0s
Thanks for the feedback - will take a look at improving the UX on that user
journey!

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andreareina
Requiring a signup for a free trial of something that doesn't inherently need
an account pretty much instantly turns me off.

------
sjbase
Feature request: automatically generate architecture diagrams from Terraform
(or other 'infrastructure-as-code') files.

~~~
OJFord
You may be aware (and I understand that it's noiser than 'architecture
diagram') but terraform can output for graphviz.

I believe I've read AWS can too, so if you're 100% on AWS that's probably
pretty close to what you'd want.

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PanMan
I was excited about this, as I need to update our architecture diagrams.
However, first feedback:

* Heroku didn't return anything in the search

* AWS API gateway neither.

* ok, I'll start from our webserver (on heroku). No general webserver icon either.

* I'll start with the DB. No generic DB icon. MariaDB only for Azure..

So far, all my starting points are dead ends. I could work partially around
them by selecting other services (mariaDb does exist as a Azure service), but
that feels ugly/hacky..

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nodesocket
I am fan of CloudCraft which has some awesome AWS specific features such as
importing resources from AWS, cost reports, and auto-syncing resources. Adding
Google Cloud is a heavily requested feature which I am sure they are working
on.

How does Cloud Maker differ, stack-up to CloudCraft?

~~~
nivertech
Does CloudCraft allows generation of CloudFormation or terraform templates
from the diagram?

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gitgud
A lot of these architecture diagram tools have been popping up lately. Seems
like something that could be generated from accessing each of the cloud
providers right?

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ollybee
This Seems similar to [https://www.happi.io](https://www.happi.io)

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novaleaf
what about the other way around? Generate a diagram from your existing cloud
(and then maybe tweak the diagram then round-trip it)

