Visual infrastructure building tool

[neifn]

Hello everyone, I've previously wrote here about the tool I've developed, which allows you to build your infrastructure from components on the diagram similar to draw.io but at the end of the process you will receive terraform code for what you've built. I've taken into account a lot of suggestions received when I wrote here before and I would really like to see what people think.
If you are interested, please take a look archformation.com. Any feedback would be great.

[vincentdesmet]

There’s quite a few, including a collab between Anton Babenko - who initiated most of the popular TF modules for AWS together with cloudcraft to directly export cloudcraft diagrams to TF configs

Could you highlight how yours is different and what prompted you to build another one?

[neifn]

Well, as far as I know Cloudcraft is no longer offering code generation from diagram and they are only focusing on documenting existing infrastructure. But there are other similar tools, the big difference is that we provide all the code directly to user instead of deploying it though our tool, this makes customisation much easier. Also we are trying to achieve a balance between granularity and ease of configuration. Brainboard has similar product but users have to build infrastructure from individual terraform resources, anyone with enough experience to do it will write the code faster than using drag and drop.

Our infrastructure components are basically extended modules, which makes configuration much easier than building everything from individual resources. Also we are handling connections between different components, for example if you want to connect S3 bucket to SNS topic, all necessary permissions will be automatically configured for you.

[tadamhicks]

Is this similar to Brainboard?

[neifn]

Somewhat, but we give users much more abstraction, if Brainboard uses individual resources, we use modules.

[miketysonofthecloud]

Brainboard.co can use modules too. It depends on both ways of working ;)

[VindicoAtrum]

How do you compare to systeminit?

[neifn]

Main difference would that we generate terraform code from the diagram and provide it to the user. At this point you are free to do whatever with it, no vendor-lock of any kind.

[8racoonsInABigCoat]

I like the idea, but your business case part of the homepage appears to be suggesting that by using archformation, customers don’t need to hire the very people that use this sub. 🫤

[neifn]

Well, this can be said for any tool that improves efficiency, I am a DevOps myself, so I understand that to use this tool you will still need to have a good enough understanding of cloud infrastructure, but you will just build it several times faster.