Discover the 4 Stages of Cloud Project Architecture

Projects that involve changes to cloud infrastructure can be challenging every step of the way. From the initial scope through development and deployment. That is closely followed by monitoring ongoing changes, keeping on top of what changed as it happens, who made the changes and why.

This used to be hard work.

To our mind, there are 4 distinct stages during a cloud infrastructure project that can be greatly improved with a little Hava magic.

Stage 1 - Explore and Discover.

The first stage involves establishing a baseline of the current state of the infrastructure. This is crucial for understanding what is running at the beginning of a project and provides a reference point for future comparisons.

Hava, a cloud infrastructure visualization tool, automates this process by generating infrastructure and security diagrams for AWS, Azure, and GCP automatically.

Instead of trawling through mutliple vendor cloud consoles for weeks trying to work out how the existing thing hangs together, you can point Hava at the cloud accounts related to the project and find out in a few minutes.

You'll get detailed interactive diagrams showing the VPC's, security layers and all the discovered resources related to your application or project.

This explore phase sets up your project work as you know up front exactly what you have to work with.

No surprises.

Which is especially useful if the infrastructure belongs to a new client or project you are unfamiliar with.

You get to see the baseline whether it is you, your dev team or the client that is undertaking the project.

You can use the interactive infrastructure view to see and investigate running resources, the security view to see how the security groups and ports are configured, view any container workloads using the container view and in the case of AWS review the compliance recommendations prior to work commencing.

This can now be done in minutes, single handed, or more accurately hands free, no cape or marker pens required.

Stage 2 - Transparent Architecture Build and Deployment

Once your baseline is established and work commences keeping tabs on exactly what is being deployed by your team is an essential component of a well managed project.

Hava's integrations help in a number of ways:

• Sync infrastructure diagrams during deployment (GitHib Actions / API)
• Capture diagrams as artifacts in your GitHub Docs repo
• Monitor and trigger alerts

Although Hava syncs automatically and generates new diagrams when changes are detected, you may also manually trigger a diagram refresh as new infrastructure is deployed. This goes a long way to establishing great documentation or supporting an architecture decision register to ensure everyone knows why things have changed.

You can use Hava's GitHub Action or the API to trigger new diagrams and capture diagrams whenever IaaC is deployed.

As a project or product owner or the poor soul responsible for managed client services you can stay on top of changes your team or your client is making by setting architectural monitoring alerts.

This means you can get an email alert whenever infrastructure changes. You can choose the environments or individual VPCs to monitor or you can set up a custom diagram based on tags and monitor hybrid cloud solutions across multiple vendors.

Whenever a resource is added or removed, you get a diff diagram via email and the alerts console - a little something like this:

This means you are always on top of the changes. You can query suspect additions or let the client know the resources they just added are likely to have a large impact on their upcoming bill - get ahead of the bill shock.

Stage 3 - "As Built" diagrams for your customer / team as it happens

Showing customers or your team what is running or what has just been built is always a good idea. Especially if you can present the information where they hang out all day.

The "as built" base diagrams showing infrastructure and security as it was built and then revisions as the infrastructure evolves clearly communicates to your team or customers what they have running and what those resources are likely to cost.

One place many teams collaborate and store information is Atlassian Confluence. The popular Wiki is used by dev and tech teams to store important information about applications and infrastructure.

Hava's Confluence plug in allows you to place live interactive diagrams (or static - your choice) directly in your or your client's wiki where they are more likely to find it. This also means they do not need access to your Hava account which may contain other environment you would rather they didn't have access to.

You can store progressive iterations of your infrastructure as versions are rolled out, so you can refer back to older versions to see the evolution of the architecture over time. This can help answer a lot of questions.

Stage 4 - Track and Alert

Finally once the flurry of development and infrastructure work is complete and the project is delivered, you may still want to keep an eye on what is changing.

People will wonder how you pick up on every change across the dozens of environments you manage.

This is important on a number of levels. It shows you are on your game, whether that is to management or clients.

It also allows you to give managed services clients the leeway to make whatever changes they like without needing going through you first. You get to see what changes they have made and can jump on any security or budget implications as soon as the changes are made. This means your clients aren't constrained and you aren't slowing them down with administrative hoops to jump through, however you always know what is going on and can step in if necessary.

If you want to find out more, we recently published a blog post on this topic.

You can find it here:

Tracking the 4 Stages of Cloud Architecture Change During a Project

Thanks for reading,

Team Hava.