> Why did you decide to go with diagramming as a solution?
I had a similar idea. I have enough experience with visual programming environments to be wary. Here are my thoughts on why it might be a good approach here:
* It would be possible to take a whiteboard scribble and turn it into a real system. Combining this with the services available in the cloud, you end up with something really powerful. It all comes down to the level of abstraction supported. You have to be able to draw boxes at a level that adds value, but also zoom in to parameters at the service/API level as necessary.
* I've worked on a team that was responsible for designing and maintaining its own AWS infrastructure. Along with that comes the responsibility for controlling cost. The idea of having a living architectural diagram that also reported cost in near real-time is really helpful, especially if you could start to do things like project cost given a level of traffic or some other measure.
Once you have a decent library of TF modules, and an understanding of the networking and compute fundamentals, and an understanding of the services offered by your cloud provider, you have something really powerful. If a service can help accelerate that, it's worth it IMHO.
You have really hit the nail on the head with what we were going for! Cory and I, very early on said "We draw this stuff, agree on it, then go build it in TF which is where the problems start".
We imagined a world where you could go into architecture review and come out of that meeting with staging stood up and ready to run your application.
This makes sense for infra because it's mostly config management and API calls. Visual programming is rough because control structures are soo hard to visualize.
I had a similar idea. I have enough experience with visual programming environments to be wary. Here are my thoughts on why it might be a good approach here: * It would be possible to take a whiteboard scribble and turn it into a real system. Combining this with the services available in the cloud, you end up with something really powerful. It all comes down to the level of abstraction supported. You have to be able to draw boxes at a level that adds value, but also zoom in to parameters at the service/API level as necessary. * I've worked on a team that was responsible for designing and maintaining its own AWS infrastructure. Along with that comes the responsibility for controlling cost. The idea of having a living architectural diagram that also reported cost in near real-time is really helpful, especially if you could start to do things like project cost given a level of traffic or some other measure.
Once you have a decent library of TF modules, and an understanding of the networking and compute fundamentals, and an understanding of the services offered by your cloud provider, you have something really powerful. If a service can help accelerate that, it's worth it IMHO.