Generate Interactive AWS Architecture Diagrams Directly From Terraform State

0:00This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Generate interactive AWS architecture diagrams directly from Terraform State. By Krishna Dutt. Let's be honest, we've all been in this exact situation. You join a new engineering team. You get repo access. You ask the obvious question, where is the architecture diagram? Usually, someone sends you a link to a Confluence page that hasn't been tushed in two years, or worse, they just hand you a massive Terraform repo, point at the file, and basically wish you good luck. Figuring out inherited infrastructure by reading code is painful, but trying to draw and maintain accurate architecture diagrams by hand in Lucidchart or draw.io. That's a losing battle. The second you click, save, your diagram is obsolete. I got incredibly tired of this cycle. So, I build TerraViz. It's an open-source Terraform visualizer and a AWS architecture diagram generator. Here's exactly why I built it and why you might want to drop it into your terminal today.

1:02The problem with existing visualization tools when I looked for tools to generate diagrams from Terraform automatically. I found three totally frustrating categories. One. The SAS traps. Sure, they look great, but they want you to upload your files to their cloud. As someone working in DevSecOps, sending state files, which notoriously leak sensitive data and plaintext secrets, to a third-party server is a massive red flag. No thanks, too, the dependency nightmares. Other open-source tools make you install a massive node, JS dependency tree. Are they forced you to run a local database and wrestle with Docker containers just to see a simple graph? Three, the static exporters. You know the ones. They spit out an unreadable graph vis-png that looks like a bowl of spaghetti the moment you have more than 20 resources. I wanted something frictionless. A tool that actually respected developer experience, DX, TerraViz TerraViz is just a single, portable go-binary. That's it. You download it,

2:03run it against your state file, and it spins up a local web server with a highly interactive, searchable diagram. No SAS accounts. No. No external databases. Because I used Go's directive, all the HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and over 600 AWS SVG icons are baked directly into the 47 megabytes executable. How to run it? Why use this? I built this tool to solve actual headaches I was dealing with while migrating massive cloud environments. Here is how it helps. Total local security. TerraViz parses your entirely on your local machine. Loading remote state from an S3 bucket? It securely uses your local AWS credentials profile. Your data never leaves your laptop. Spotting, ghost, dependencies. This is honestly my favorite feature. Terraform state often references resources created manually or living in a different state file, like a core VPC or a shared security group. TerraViz looks at attributes like or I am aren'ts. If it sees a reference to something

3:07missing from the current state, it draws an inferred node. You stop flying blind, handling real world scale, static images suck for large infrastructure. TerraViz gives you an SVG-based interactive canvas, zoom, pan, and filter by resource type. Looking for one specific lambda buried in a sea of IAM policies? Use the real-time search bar. Live AWS scanning. Terraform isn't the only way things get deployed. By running, the CLI uses your standard AWS SDK credentials to discover EC2 instances, S3 buckets, RDS databases, and lambdas directly from your live account. Catching drift with diffs, making major refactors, scan your infrastructure, make your Terraform changes, scan again, and run. It spits out a clear diff showing exactly what change. Killing the hero's CULTUREI write a lot about eliminating, hero culture, and engineering. That toxic idea that only one senior engineer understands how the systems actually fit together. Tools like TerraViz help democratize

4:12that knowledge. When anyone on your team can pull down a repo, run a single command, and visually explore the infrastructure in five seconds, you remove the bottleneck of tribal knowledge. TerraViz is completely open source under the MIT license. It heavily supports AWS right now, but the architecture is designed with provider interfaces tovincially support GCP and Azure. Check out the binary releases and source code here. GitHub.com slash christianadadpanchanula slash TerraViz drop a star if you find it useful. Let's stop drawing diagrams by hand. Thank you for listening to this hackernoon story, read by artificial intelligence. Visit hackernoon.com to read, write, learn, and publish.