How to Break Down Silos and Build Faster with Cloudcraft by Datadog

By Jason Mimick, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Jace Harker, Sr. Product Manager – Datadog 
By Michael Yitayew, Product Marketing Manager – Datadog

Datadog

Success in the business world today typically requires alignment across the organization, and leaders must bring teams together, break down silos, and get things done cheaper and faster.

From engineering and support to finance, sales, and the executive suite, each team needs to see what’s happening but often have very different goals.

Plus, businesses are innovating in the cloud more than ever, and to ship successful cloud-based products distributed teams have to align on their architecture vision, budget, and security protocols. This is especially true when architecting new applications or reconfiguring existing solutions; all teams involved must have clear visibility into their deployed cloud resources, dependencies, and budget.

One solution helping companies break down silos is Cloudcraft by Datadog. Whether you’re building an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud architecture from scratch, tracking changes in your environment, or looking to optimize cloud cost, Cloudcraft allows you to get visibility into your architecture and dependencies in real-time. This brings teams together to ideate, build, and ship faster.

Datadog is an AWS Specialization Partner and AWS Marketplace Seller that has been building integrations with AWS services for over a decade, amassing a growing catalog of 90+ integrations. The addition of Cloudcraft brings a new dimension for customers to take advantage of Datadog’s observability capabilities.

Solution Overview

Providing cross-functional teams with simple ways to visualize complex AWS deployments is incredibly valuable for organizations. Enabling teams to quickly dive deep into architecture diagrams and drill into details with a few clicks can be an organizational game changer—speeding up troubleshooting, onboarding, and shortening development cycles.

In this section, we discuss four common reasons customers are moving their AWS cloud architecting efforts into Cloudcraft by Datadog.

Figure 1 – Sample Cloudcraft 3D blueprint.

#1 – Get Visibility into Cloud Infrastructure

With Cloudcraft, companies can get visibility into their architecture in minutes and dive deep into the details. In a rapidly expanding and highly distributed cloud infrastructure environment, it can be difficult to make decisions about the design and management of cloud architectures. Thousands of cloud resources are distributed across hundreds of accounts.

You need broad, complete visibility in order to find underutilized resources and other forms of bloat. Cloudcraft gives you this visibility and is optimized for AWS so you can draw diagram components for dozens of key services, including established products.

#2 – Document Planned Architectures and Automate Wiki Updates

Customers want to document their planned architectures and automate updates so their source of truth—a Confluence page, for example—always reflects their live infrastructure. With Cloudcraft, you can do this collaboratively and in real-time, with multiple active cursors from participants working synchronously.

Cloudcraft lets you easily share diagrams across development, security, revenue, and solution architecting teams by exporting them or embedding them in Confluence.

Figure 2 – Example using an embeddable blueprint.

#3 – Refactor Architectures and Plan with Budget in Mind

Engineers can also present their cloud solution ideas and easily share with reviewers. Cloudcraft uses the AWS Cost Explorer API to calculate monthly spend and allows you to switch to hourly, daily, weekly, and yearly views.

With the budget feature, you can conduct cost analysis and what-if scenarios. For example, if you select all of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances on the diagram and change the instance type, you can see the cost dynamically adjust.

This allows you to explore various cost saving opportunities, find the best fit for your requirements, and present these optimization options to your team with professional diagrams.

Figure 3 – Insight into costs via Cloudcraft.

#4 – Run Audits with Professional Diagrams

Many compliance standards (including SOC2) actually require customers to submit a diagram of their cloud architecture. This could take an engineering team 3-4 days to prepare. In reality, most customers take weeks or longer.

With Cloudcraft, customers can spin it up in a few minutes. This means site reliability engineers can run audits of their cloud environment and meet compliance requirements on time.

How to Get Started

If Cloudcraft sounds like a great fit for your goals, here’s how you can try it out in just a few minutes.

• After signing into your Cloudcraft account, create an AWS managed read-only-access role in your AWS accounts.

Figure 4 – Setting up the Cloudcraft integration in your AWS account.

• Once you’ve added your AWS accounts, you’ll be able to see them in the drop-down under the Live tab. You can choose an AWS account and region (us-east-1, for example) to scan.
• Clicking Scan now will initiate a live scan and populate an inventory list of all the resources that are currently deployed in that region and account. This is helpful to get to know the lay of the land, which resources have been deployed, and how they are connected.
• Click Auto Layout to render your live diagram.

Figure 5 – Example 2D Cloudcraft blueprint.

You have now rendered a high-level overview of your region in seconds, rather than days of building manual diagrams which are not kept up to date. This capability has an impact across the entire organization—visualizing resources, their relationships, networking layers, and under-utilization—just to name a few.

As your business and team grow, lack of these insights typically leads to system misconfiguration, poor communication across teams, and budget uncertainty.

Conclusion

In this post, we discussed how Cloudcraft enables users to gain valuable insights into AWS cloud deployments through a variety of features. Cloudcraft is able to perform live scans and generate 3D and 2D blueprints that provide visibility into your AWS deployments. These artifacts can be embedded into wikis, giving teams to ability to keep documentation up to date as application evolve.

Finally, teams are able to explore costs and saving opportunities which improves the efficiency of tasks like budgeting, designing new systems, and refactoring architectures.

Sign into Cloudcraft to connect your AWS account and get started for free to see how the ability to maintain real-time and forward looking architecture visualizations can boost your organization’s collaboration.

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Datadog – AWS Partner Spotlight

Datadog is an AWS Specialization Partner that has been building integrations with AWS services for over a decade, amassing a growing catalog of 90+ integrations. The addition of Cloudcraft brings a new dimension for customers to take advantage of Datadog’s observability capabilities.

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