cfnbuddy

cfnbuddy

Automated AWS diagrams and CloudFormation templates in git

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Cfnbuddy is for engineers looking to automate and understand how their AWS infra hang together. It converts your infra into CloudFormation templates and architecture diagrams, then sends you git commits of any changes. All of that completely hands-off.
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Launch tags:Developer Tools•Tech
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What do you think? …

George Apostolov
LiveDemo
The product looks great. Right from the start I can see that you have automated a very tedious process, kudos to that. I was wondering, how are you actually drawing the diagrams, after you have the data ? Also, I want to congratulate you on the good FAQ, explaining also some of the features which are not still developed.
Jeshan Babooa
Maker
@telltrail Appreciate your feedback and thanks for checking it out, Georgi. I take the resources, find relationships among them and run the whole in headless Chrome (with the node puppeteer library). There, I draw the resources and their relationships on an html canvas. I then save a screenshot of that canvas. But that's the easy part; drawing hundreds of high-res images every hour for you is very resource intensive (e.g serverless is definitely not a good fit). How I make them look good and work at scale is part of the "secret sauce".
George Apostolov
LiveDemo
@jeshan25 Great work, I was thinking about generating html pages for the diagrams and taking screenshots. I don't have much experience with canvas but I think that if you pivot to using plain html with svg for the diagrams, this will allow you to build a SaaS app on top of your project where you will be able to modify your diagrams and maybe orchestrate AWS in the future. What do you think about switching to using HTML+SVG instead of canvas? I am interested in understanding your future goals, how you want to improve your product.
Jeshan Babooa
Maker
@telltrail addressing your points: "this will allow you to build a Saas" - The vision I have for the product is to make it as frictionless as possible (all you have to do is "git pull") and Saas will introduce friction (auth, uptime guarantees, UX, etc). However, I could send a webapp in the git commit and let the user use it as they please in complete privacy. That crossed my mind. However, this is a significant endeavour and I'm opening feature requests only to customers for now. "modify your diagrams": I do have a minimal webapp for my personal use but I am not ready to offer it as a feature. "and maybe orchestrate AWS in the future": There are no plans to directly address that, however making such an existing system (i.e CloudFormation) as painless as possible is within scope. "switching to using HTML+svg": svg is certainly an excellent option. I have tested png images and they work really well. My app is designed to work offline and without a browser, so png is good fit.
George Apostolov
LiveDemo
@jeshan25 Wait after you wrote about that CloudFormation has similar feature. I remembered about CloudFormation Designer. AWS Designer allow you to visually see how your cloudformation template looks. And also allows you to download it! I can imagine that the process of visualizing a template and making a screenshot then sending it to the people would be easy as well, by using AWS Designer. So, now I am wondering how Cfnbuddy would differ from AWS Designer. I assume that you already found flaws in AWS Designer to decide to develop your own CloudFormation Diagram tool.
Jeshan Babooa
Maker
@telltrail correct, you can download from there but you'd have to remember to download the image each time you change your resources. As far as I know, there's no api for getting the images. It works for hobbyists but won't scale for those who deploy production apps regularly. Also, it will support only the templates that you give it one-by-one. Since cfnbuddy represents your broader infrastructure as cloudformation templates, you can do more interesting things, e.g where are all your SSL certificates being used?, or what security groups allow Internet access? It will work whether associated resources were all deployed in one stack or even by completely separate teams. It seems that you're really enthusiastic about the possibilities. Why not sign up? I'll be there to give you a personal walkthrough and answer all your questions (you could cancel right away and still receive scans for the full month)
Michael Kane
Clever idea - I can see this being really useful. Nice work!
Jeshan Babooa
Maker
As a developer who has OCD about productivity, I find 2 big issues that remains unresolved on AWS: 1: understanding my infra and, 2: how to automate it with CloudFormation. Navigating pages in different regions and accounts is slow and tedious. Writing scripts can only get you so far. Diagrams are nice but you still have to draw them. When you do, they get outdated by the time you come back from lunch. Also, CloudFormation has a long feedback cycle even if you've made simple typo. Given all this, I thought that there must be a better solution that works ideally without me having to think about it. This is why I built cfnbuddy. It grew out of my own needs to solve such issues. How it works is it regularly scans your AWS account, creates CloudFormation templates and architecture diagrams out of it and send you a git commit every hour. Therefore, you have an accurate view of what you have in your infra under git. But that's just the start. What does representing your infra under git imply? Several things: - Templates are regular files, so you could use it compare your dev, test and production environments using familiar diff tools. Great for spotting inconsistencies in your environments. - since git works offline, you can work with cfnbuddy offline too. That's the fastest way to look for your resources across accounts and regions. - Don't want to figure out the CloudFormation syntax? That's OK; experiment by creating the resource manually and cfnbuddy's next commit will give you the snippet needed for you to recreate it with CloudFormation. - Since your broader infra is represented as CloudFormation templates, cfnbuddy could run static analysis tool on it. In fact, 150+ cfn-nag scans are available as a core feature to help spot bad practices and insecure config. - your diagrams will remain up to date. cfnbuddy works in the background so you just do a "git pull" when you're ready to see changes. - create a git repo for your whole team, no matter the size. I won't (and can't) prevent you from inviting your whole org. One plan for the whole team and unlimited resources (per AWS account). VPC diagrams are nice but only limited; that's why I included several "views" on your infra, e.g where are your encryption keys being used? how are your SSL certificates being used? are your Cloudwatch alarms sending actions to the right place? What ports are open to the world? There's an image for that. (15 diagram types across all regions included) Questions I imagine you may have: "Giving you access to my AWS account sounds creepy". Definitely a reasonable concern! I wouldn't blindly trust it neither but know that cfnbuddy cannot read your S3 objects, log on your servers, nor see your serverless code. It can even sync to GitHub/GitLab without your access token leaving your account. Everything is documented and auditable in our setup CloudFormation template. (Feel free to have it reviewed by a security expert; I share more security details on the website) "But aren't images inefficient to store in git?" That's why cfnbuddy sends commits only when something really changes. I go to great lengths to make sure that your repo won't get bloated. "I need these templates and diagrams once". That's OK; you can sign up and cancel right away. You'll continue to receive commits for the duration of your subscription. The catch? There's no free trial. I may add one later but right now I want to give individual attention to those who are most eager to try cfnbuddy. If that sounds like you, I'm looking for 10 early adopters with whom I'll work really closely. What's in it for you? Lock in the best price and feature set I'll ever offer. I'll also bump your feature requests on top of my priority queue. I'll be flattered if you could check it out at https://www.cfnbuddy.com and share your first impressions about it below.