In today’s speed of modern development, every advantage that can help organizations achieve shorter release cycles is extremely valuable. oak9’s, Architecture Lens, aims to do just that by showing users a holistic 10,000-foot view of their misconfigurations that can be remediated in just one click.
Why this tool?
Providing critical information quickly is always a top priority for oak9’s users. The amount of time saved by not having to review thousands of lines of terraform to find which port was left open was a bonus. Engineers now are not only able to visualize their architecture, but also able to identify & remediate misconfigurations quickly.
How does Architecture lens work?
Let’s say you have uploaded your resources into oak9’s visual designer. You can see your load balancers, web server and database. You are curious of the relationships they have with each other, so you click on load balancer. The questions the Architecture Lens can now answer are:
1.How is it talking to the database?
2.What port is the load balancer talking to the database on? I
3.Is the database over an SSL encryption?
4.Who from the outside world is able to hit the load balancer?
Architecture lens will tie the security groups that are associated with the load balancer and will show the user the rules that it has with the database.
How does this help the user?
Before Architecture lens, users would only find this information after reviewing the design gaps individually which can become time consuming when there are several resources to review. Now one click on the resource will visually display the information for you.
oak9’s Director of DevOps, Ramesh Patel – “It can review your current architecture and help with your future work. If you see a load balancer that has port 80 and 443 open and you’re like, OK, well 80 shouldn’t be open, then you close it”
Example of Architecture Lens
After an oak9 user uploaded their resources, they have a database, a load balancer and an EC2 instance that are sitting in a VPC. Now, with Architecture lens, the user is able to now click on the load balancer to see timely critical information such as, the relationship it has with the EC2. What port it is connected to and the relationship it has. Then the user can click onto the EC2 and go deeper by determining what relationship does it have with the database? Is it talking over SSL port or not. Then the user can investigate the database. Is there encryption? Why are there a whole range of ports open?
When a project has 600 design gaps, It can be time consuming to sort through them all to find the information you want to view quickly. Architecture lens allows that. You can now see the entire flow and relationship between all the resources.
To see what design gaps your project may have, sign up for free today with the button below.
