Pfffft.... Who needs drag and drop?

Been a while since I've written a personal piece on LinkedIn, but thought I'd take the time to write about this, as it just saved me hours!

I'm working with a customer who requested that our consultants jump in and get started on cleaning up their AWS environments. This isn't a rare request. Part of the reason Hava was created was because as a consultancy, we kept getting this request and it took too long to manually draw diagrams. Hava gave us the ability as consultants to quickly see what's running, convert hand-crafted stuff into CloudFormation and start fixing things.

So why am I writing this now? Because 12 months down the road and actioning these sorts of requests have become so easy for me now. I hadn't got my hands dirty with onsite work for a little while, but here's how the story played out:

1) The client requested that we take a look at things, document it and then suggest how to make it better.
2) I ran Hava, and in less than a minute, I had a view of all of their accounts and environments that they're running.
3) I exported all of the automated diagrams to PDF and chuck it into my doco. Yup... no drag and drop required.
4) I then grabbed the CloudFormation out of Hava and started modifying it to how I know things need to be.
5) I re-imported the CloudFormation into Hava, and illustrated to the customer the changes that need to be made visually. How? I just invite them to the team in Hava, and they could see it themselves in their own Hava account.
6) AND... I started pushing the fixes out.

Boooooom! I know they say you should eat your own dog food, but I was drinking my own champagne. If you commonly have a request like the one above, jump onto Hava... signup to a plan... and make your life easier.

https://hava.io

Cool stuff,

Pete