
Show HN: Cloudcraft – Create AWS diagrams - Rezo
https://cloudcraft.co/
======
lbotos
Some feedback: "In the delta of your current understanding and the reality of
the cloud, lies cost savings and insight." This sentence was a little
confusing. Maybe:

Cloudcraft make it easy and clear where your could is and where it could go.

Something a little simpler and more direct.

~~~
Rezo
Thank you, as a non-native English speaker this is extremely valuable
feedback. I'll rework the text.

One idea is that could literally run a infrastructure diff of your
architecture and your live environment, for example after a deployment or
between two points in time: You may have resources left over by accident, or
not captured in the design.

~~~
WillAbides
I like the delta sentence. It is artful. The only reason the intent is unclear
is a lack of context. I didn't see anything else on the page that references
difs or deltas.

I am looking forward to trying cloudcraft on Monday when I have to document a
cluster of ec2 instances.

~~~
jewbacca
I agree, I love the original construction. It's extremely compelling, big-
league copy. How about just tuning slightly simpler:

"Somewhere in the difference between your current understanding and the
reality of the cloud, lies cost savings and insight."

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cddotdotslash
This kind of tool was sorely needed. I've used countless online diagraming
tools with support for AWS icons and every one takes an unnecessarily long
amount of time to get working. I ultimately settled on making my own diagrams
in PowerPoint using the AWS PPT template. This tool is much easier to use and
makes things look great without much effort.

~~~
Rezo
Thanks! I think by focusing solely on AWS instead of trying to create a
generic diagram drawing tool it's possible to create a much better experience.

~~~
miles932
As one of the original guys making those iso diagrams, we asked internal AWS
folks to build a tool like this for _years_. Nice work!

~~~
robbles
What did you use for making them? I've been curious about those great looking
diagrams for years.

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Rezo
A word of warning, the UI doesn't work too well on mobile devices yet, it's
sized for desktops. I hope to fix this in the near future.

Here's an actual screenshot kindly posted by Jeff Barr of what the UI looks
like
[https://twitter.com/jeffbarr/status/674357220847443968](https://twitter.com/jeffbarr/status/674357220847443968)

~~~
jon-wood
Please don't dump time into making it mobile friendly. Nobody with any sense
is trying to diagram their infrastructure from a mobile phone, so you may as
well focus on higher value features. Preferably ones you can charge for so I'm
not mourning the loss of this great tool in six month's time!

~~~
Rezo
I hear you, but I at least want to make it work on tablet sizes for some quick
editing or presentation, and for viewing the results on phones (probably no
editing).

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edjboston
This is awesome. Wouldn't it be cool is this were wired up to an orchestration
tool like Terraform to visualize TF states?

Another level would be container infrastructure. Our new project is
Docker/Kubernetes so the AWS infrastructure mostly just vanilla resources. It
would be fantastic to have a similar tool for the internals of our micro SOA.

Great job!

~~~
Rezo
Thanks, I added Terraform import & export to
[https://trello.com/b/mv14mX1U/cloudcraft-
roadmap](https://trello.com/b/mv14mX1U/cloudcraft-roadmap) What type of
components would you need to map your service internals?

BTW, I think it's key to stay clear of trying to become an
orchestration/deployment tool in itself, but integrating with formats like
CloudFormation and Terraform should be doable.

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joeyspn
Am I the only one who thinks that adding a CloudFormation export (json) to
this tool would be awesome?

~~~
Rezo
It's on the roadmap :) [https://trello.com/b/mv14mX1U/cloudcraft-
roadmap](https://trello.com/b/mv14mX1U/cloudcraft-roadmap)

~~~
discordianfish
CloudFormation import would be great as well!

~~~
Rezo
With a read-only IAM role installed in your account it could provide import of
current resources and a live view of your environment.

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lobsterloga
what would be super cool if given AWS credentials, it'll auto draw the diagram
for you?

The tool is awesome, btw! Thank you VERY MUCH.

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bitwarrior
Static resources go right in the garbage!

~~~
Rezo
It's supposed to be a S3 Bucket, but I can see how it looks like a trashcan ;)

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jsz0
Looks good. I was able to put together a fairly complex diagram in about 15
minutes. Thats better than I can do with most traditional diagramming
applications. In that way having limited options helps because there's less
things to get distracted by. Anytime I try to make a diagram in Visio or
Omnigraffle I spend (at least) 15 minutes just adjusting fonts, sizing, etc.
It ends up being a very frustrating experience. So much so that I've mostly
gone back to making paper diagrams.

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narsil
Awesome! This is solving a real problem when it comes to visualizing
infrastructure. I recently provided AWS with feedback at a focus group in SF
on releasing a tool like this. So far, I've had to use Gliffy to create
diagrams using Amazon's official Simple Icons. [0]

Minor note: my screen is fairly narrow, and the Preview/Export buttons hide
the action buttons for EC 2 nodes. I notice the element has a z-index of 1. It
might be better to ensure the Preview/Export buttons are always hidden by any
boxes appearing when the user clicks a component.

[0]
[https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/](https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/)

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mej10
Looks cool! I am going to draw out some diagrams using this next week.

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mariocesar
Something interesting to do from now on: Search in Google
`site:[https://cloudcraft.co/view`](https://cloudcraft.co/view`) You will see
the shared links from existing diagrams.

Right now Google had just indexed one
[https://cloudcraft.co/view/d3908616-4d96-4d5c-8747-6856e8801...](https://cloudcraft.co/view/d3908616-4d96-4d5c-8747-6856e88010aa?key=0yi62tykmzbmx6r0)

~~~
Rezo
Sorry to spoil the fun, but I've disallowed /view/ from robots.txt to prevent
accidental shares. I think this one must have been from someone sharing on
Twitter or some other public place where Google would have picked it up.

~~~
swalberg
robots.txt only tells spiders not to request a certain path. The search engine
can still infer the content of the page from the link or surrounding text, and
show it. Google usually annotates these in the SERPs with something like
"Google is not displaying the contents of the page because it's been blocked
with robots.txt"

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awjr
This is so damn sexy (and really useful)! Kudos

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yranadive
FWIW react components are alerting :) "Warning: Failed propType: Invalid prop
`value` of type `string` supplied to `DropDownMenu`, expected `object`. Check
the render method of `SelectField`."

The app is beautiful. The most important you hit right on target is the
perspective. Visually this perspective allows the best understanding.

~~~
Rezo
Thanks, the warning is an upstream component bug
([https://github.com/callemall/material-
ui/issues/2267](https://github.com/callemall/material-ui/issues/2267)) but
it's fortunately harmless.

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mikejholly
This is excellent! Well done.

Would be awesome if it supported non-AWS (more generic) resources as well.

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rurounijones
You have a "sign in with google" option. Can we get others? (sign in with
Github would be nice, that is the nexus of all my dev related stuff and use it
in a bunch of other dev related services.)

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chr15
How are you getting accurate pricing for AWS components? I know Amazon's
Simple Calculator uses an undocumented pricing endpoint, but that endpoint
could change and become inaccurate.

~~~
Rezo
Pages like
[https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing) use a
JSONP request to get a big messy chunk of pricing data. I have parsed that,
and serve it with a custom API that does the calculations from the Cloudcraft
backend to the React-based frontend.

However, AWS just announced a proper pricing API! Check out
[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-price-list-
api](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-price-list-api) This will make
life much easier, it does however not yet cover all services, for example
ElastiCache is still missing while Cloudcraft already serves pricing for it.

~~~
chr15
Yup, that JSON is the response from the endpoint I'm referring to. Congrats on
shipping!

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redmaverick
Why is it free? Are you planning to monetize it in the future?

~~~
Rezo
I was thinking of offering features for larger teams like collaborative
editing and sync with a live AWS environment as addons in the future if it
proves popular.

Drawing diagrams is and will remain free.

~~~
andreasklinger
you could add basic alert/load/utilization analytics and offer it as it
management (or just big tv in room) overview dashboard.

~~~
jon-wood
This would be a fantastic feature, and should be pretty doable considering how
much Cloudwatch exposes in the way of metrics.

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cypret
Great job with this, I can't wait to play around with it more. The bane of my
life is creating graphics but this is something I will actually use.

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ceejayoz
This is sorely needed and really well done thus far. I've always envied the
beautiful AWS diagrams they feature in their case studies.

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omginternets
I like the idea a lot, but I'm not a fan of the fancy 3d visualization. Is
there a way to have a simpler (2D) representation?

~~~
Gigablah
There are lots of tools that already do 2D diagrams with AWS icons.

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frik
How have you created the beautiful 3D icons? The look better than from the AWS
icon template site. :)

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efm
This solves a real problem, beautifully.

Minor complaint. I couldn't find how to restart the tutorial.

~~~
Rezo
Thank you. You can restart the tutorial from the "User" icon in the top-right
corner.

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newman314
This is very nice. It would be great to have vCloud Director support at some
point.

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teddythetwig
Amazon recently introduced a tool similar to this called cloudformations
designer.

~~~
narsil
The visuals aren't 3D. The OP's mirrors AWS' own architecture diagrams in
their guides and case studies. It's unfortunate CloudFormations Designer
doesn't create visuals like the ones AWS' own designers use.

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impostervt
Is the grid/menu/etc all custom, or are you using some UI libraries?

~~~
Rezo
The grid and everything on it is custom made on top of HTML5 Canvas, that's
probably 80% of the code, many of the elements are isometrically projected at
runtime. The menus and dialogs are done using Material-UI
([http://www.material-ui.com](http://www.material-ui.com)) and React.js

~~~
impostervt
Please consider open sourcing that grid. It's very cool by itself and could be
used for a lot of other things.

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Svenstaro
Clicking "pricing" doesn't seem to do anything for me.

~~~
enraged_camel
It scrolls down to the Pricing section where it says:

"Cloudcraft is entirely free to use! You can use it to create professional AWS
visualizations and diagrams for any use, in both commercial and non-commercial
projects.

"What you create is yours. We support and encourage you to export to Wikis,
documentation, formal RFPs, posters on your team wall..."

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alexchamberlain
Just wondering what the motivation was for making this free?

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obulpathi
Wondering if there are any plans to support Google Cloud?

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sylvinus
Great tool! How do you extend the grid?

~~~
Rezo
Resizing the grid is one of the top next things
([https://trello.com/b/mv14mX1U/cloudcraft-
roadmap](https://trello.com/b/mv14mX1U/cloudcraft-roadmap)), but it also
requires adding panning and zooming of the canvas itself so it's going to a
take a little while.

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jafingi
Wow. Really awesome! Great work.

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motles
dope.

