How many times have you asked developers or architects working on a product for an updated architecture diagram and the answer you’ve got is “we don’t have any or it needs to be build”. I’ve seen this many times through out my career as a consultant and SA working across many industries in NA and Europe. Not having insights into your workload is a big challenge especially when you are working across multiple teams and are operating in the cloud. Teams are agile and change is introduced on a daily or weekly basis. So how can you keep your diagrams up to date with a constantly changing environment?
AWS released AWS Perspective, a solution which allows you to gain insights into your AWS accounts by creating interactive and dynamic diagrams. The solution can be setup within less than an hour. To setup the AWS Perspective in your regions, you can follow the implementation guide.
Once the CloudFormations run completes, you will get a CloudFront URL which points you to the Cognito login page for AWS Perspective.
AWS Perspective will also provide you with the option to add the other regions
as well as other AWS account’s in the same AWS organization.
AWS Perspective uses AWS Config to discover your resources. These resources will then be analyzed and saved into a graph database (Neptune) enabling the dynamic creation of architecture diagrams for your AWS environment.