Tue Aug 28 2018
Arcentry API: Programmable Cloud Diagrams
It's been quite a few late evenings and coffee-sustained nights, but today we are excited to announce that Arcentry diagrams have just become programmable.
But...why?
Keeping track of the bigger picture is one of the hardest things when running any cloud infrastructure. Existing tools stop at the component level and even cloud-provider dashboards are broken down into individual services and their respective instances. There's no layer above that lets you see or control what your cloud actually does or looks like. And that's a shame - because having a holistic view and seeing problems and bottlenecks in their wider context can be invaluable when it comes to debugging, maintaining and optimizing complex deployments.
Arcentry is on a mission to change that. We want to create a new, AI-powered, visual and interactive way to design, deploy and monitor cloud infrastructure (more about that here).
Of course, that's no easy task - so we are taking baby steps to get there. Arcentry already lets you create flashy looking diagrams using a host of cloud and open source components. The API we're releasing today now makes it possible to control these components in realtime using a simple REST interface. This allows you for instance to visualize scaling groups, show memory or CPU metrics next to their relative components or plot traffic distribution amongst your services.
But not only components, also labels, icons, lines or any other element of an Arcentry diagram can be controlled via the API. To try it out for yourself, head over to the API Docs to get started.
What's next?
Whilst the new API offers great flexibility, we also want to make it easy to hook up existing monitoring solutions to Arcentry. I'm happy to announce that our next major release will enable users to connect with Grafana compatible datasources such as AWS CloudWatch, ElasticSearch, InfluxDB or Prometheus to show metrics directly in the app.