Show HN: Atlasphere – Live Infrastructure Diagrams
I was once building a pet project that allowed customers to spin up fully synchronized blockchain nodes within just a few minutes. The backend was split into a control plane and a data plane, each with its own AWS account. Later I added two more AWS accounts. One for shared RPC nodes. One for the Analytics Service.
Since I love to visualize things, I used drawio to visualize the architecture.
With time, I noticed a pattern. I'd write some code, add a few lambda functions, update my drawio diagram, write more code, introduce a few more resources, test things, see that everything works fine and go to sleep with a smile on my face. Next week I'd check my diagram, and shockingly, it's missing some of the resources! This kept happening for a few more weeks until I decided to fully abandon the project until my infrastructure diagrams could stay in sync with my cloud account.
That's how Atlasphere.io was born. I've been working on it for the past 6 months and I think the product is ready for some feedback :)
A few notes:
- Atlasphere uses a ReadOnly IAM role to scan your AWS account (my account reaches your account through a trust relationship).
- The number of services is currently limited (WIP)
- It's a macOS app
- It's NOT an Electron app, i use Rust + Webview
What am I looking for? All I really need is for someone to try the app and tell me what they like about it and what they absolutely hate about it, haha!
The website is https://atlasphere.io/
8 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadPersonally, I am not comfortable with cross-account access from a stranger, even if it's read only. I feel like I should be able to run something locally on my side to gather the data so I can pick and choose what actually needs diagrams
Sounds fun though!
[0] block.xyz/inside/from-hierarchy-to-intelligence
[0] https://github.com/cartography-cncf/cartography
The most common issues are:
- They rely on https://github.com/mingrammer/diagrams which has simply not gotten any attention for a long time. It's too out-of-date to be useful, and any issue with rendering gets a response to "go use graphviz instead"
- When pointing these tools to anything moderately complicated, they implode or create non-nonsensical diagrams. Think: VPC Peering, VPC Security Groups, multi-account resources.
- They get the cloud resources OK, but neglect primitives like routing and policies that are just as important.
Just looking at the examples on the website: Claude Code can do this natively. Just a consideration.
I will also echo what others have said: allowing another account access to ours is a non-starter, even if Read-Only. It needs to use a security principal we have complete control over.
I can't tell from the project page what IAM permissions are in your "Read-only IAM role". That's something I would also need to know, regardless of how it is deployed.
I can tell from this post and the site that this is a labor of love, and I hope you keep up the good work. Like I said, this is an area where we need more, better tools. I want projects like this to succeed.
PS: Awesome name