Cycloid Platform Engineering - Blog

InfraMap - the awesome open-source cloud diagram maker that's going to save YOU time

Written by Niamh Lynch | Jul 16

You’ve heard of InfraView, right? Now we’d like to introduce you to InfraMap, our open-source, pared-down version of the original cloud infrastructure diagram creator.

TL;DR

InfraMap allows you to automatically generate cloud architecture diagrams in the format you want from your .tfstate files. It’s open-source and free.

The problem

Architecture diagrams are a great tool to have in your belt. Simply being able to see your infra visually, rather than interpreting it from Terraform, opens up a whole new world of possibilities, from giving others access to a traditionally complex area to more practical concerns, like documentation enhancing, troubleshooting, identifying gaps in your security, tools or design, or even onboarding new team members.

The only problem is, creating these cloud diagrams manually isn’t easy. Not only does it take a long time to ensure you’ve included all the elements, but it’s also frustrating to try and get them to display correctly in whatever tool you’ve chosen to do the job. Add both of these to the fact that it’s very easy to make a mistake when you’re transferring information from code to a non code-based app, and it’s no wonder many engineers shy away from infra diagrams.

Enter InfraMap

InfraMap was made to make your life easier, save you time, and help you operate more efficiently. It’s a tool that reads Terraform state and HCL files and renders them in whatever format you want (as long as the format is supported - we currently support DOT format, but we’re planning on adding more). InfraMap can be run from the command line or included in an existing project.

If you’re worried about sensitive data from your Terraform, don’t be. InfraMap prunes the info and only uses data that’s relevant to your graph. 

InfraMap and InfraView

If you’ve been around here before, you’ll already see the similarities between InfraMap and InfraView, part of our main product, Cycloid. Both tools run on the same engine - the difference between them is that InfraMap’s final product is a raw generated graph, whereas InfraView presents it via a slick UI that allows you to interact with and find out more about your resources. You can see more about InfraView here.

The future for InfraMap

The future’s looking bright for InfraMap. We think it’ll be perfect for smaller companies and individuals so we’re happy to keep working on it. Right now, it supports AWS, Flexible Engine, and Openstack resources, and will very soon facilitate GCP and Azure. We’d also like to enable grouping, to allow you to easily filter resources, and we think AWS IAM capabilities would be a great addition. Of course, since it’s open-source, feel free to contribute or make a suggestion - ideas are always more than welcome.