What is our primary use case?
As our AWS environment grew across multiple applications, accounts, and environments, maintaining architecture documentation became increasingly difficult. We started using Cloudcraft because the infrastructure was evolving continuously through Terraform deployments, and manually maintaining diagrams was time-consuming and often outdated. Cloudcraft became our preferred platform for creating accurate AWS diagrams that could be shared with engineering teams, management, customers, and auditors. It also provides cost estimation capabilities, which help during solution design and capacity planning.
Whenever a new application is being deployed, we first create the architecture in Cloudcraft before provisioning the infrastructure. This includes all AWS components like Route 53, WAF, and CloudFront, allowing technical and non-technical stakeholders to understand the complete solution before deployment begins.
How has it helped my organization?
Cloudcraft has positively impacted our organization as infrastructure documentation is more consistent and easier to maintain. Solution review meetings are much more productive because everyone is discussing the same visual architecture now. Infrastructure planning becomes faster because architecture can be quickly assembled and modified, leading to better customer communication and improved cost awareness.
What is most valuable?
The best features Cloudcraft offers include visual AWS architecture, the ability to create professional AWS diagrams quickly, significant time savings during solution design, cost estimation, and having estimated infrastructure costs directly within the architecture diagram. Cloudcraft also makes collaboration easier as architecture diagrams can be shared across infrastructure teams. AWS best practice visualization is there, encouraging better architecture design by making it easy to visualize high availability, multi-AZ deployment, public versus private subnets, and security layers. Creating architecture documentation that previously required several hours can now be completed much more quickly.
Architecture design and documentation have had the biggest impact on my team. These are part of our day-to-day work that were time-consuming previously, and now they are easy to accomplish.
What needs improvement?
There are areas for improvement in Cloudcraft, such as more cloud service coverage and quicker support for new AWS services releases. Real-time collaborative editing could be improved for larger infrastructure teams working simultaneously. Integration with IaaC, such as deeper integration with Terraform and IaaC workflows, could further simplify documenting updates.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Cloudcraft for more than two years, primarily for AWS structure visualization, documentation, architecture planning, and cost estimation.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What was our ROI?
We have seen a return on investment as the time spent documenting has shifted from five hours to completing tasks within one or two hours.
We have seen specific outcomes, such as time saved in respect of manual work, documentation, and architecture designing.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is positive as Cloudcraft provides strong value to organizations requiring regulatory design documents and AWS architecture. I view the pricing as reasonable given the value it delivers, and the setup was straightforward.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Cloudcraft, we evaluated other options such as draw.io.
What other advice do I have?
I would advise others looking into using Cloudcraft that it is a very good product for organizations building or maintaining AWS environments who want a professional, efficient, and collaborative way to design and document cloud architectures. I rate this product highly based on my experience.
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)