Yet another Hacker News

17 points andreygrehov 1 day ago 4 comments

Hi HN. My name is Andrey. On a regular business day, I'm a software engineer working at AWS. Outside of work hours, I spend time on my hobby - writing code.

I was once building a pet project that allowed customers to spin up fully synchronized blockchain nodes within just a few minutes. The backend was split into a control plane and a data plane, each with its own AWS account. Later I added two more AWS accounts. One for shared RPC nodes. One for the Analytics Service.

Since I love to visualize things, I used drawio to visualize the architecture.

With time, I noticed a pattern. I'd write some code, add a few lambda functions, update my drawio diagram, write more code, introduce a few more resources, test things, see that everything works fine and go to sleep with a smile on my face. Next week I'd check my diagram, and shockingly, it's missing some of the resources! This kept happening for a few more weeks until I decided to fully abandon the project until my infrastructure diagrams could stay in sync with my cloud account.

That's how Atlasphere.io was born. I've been working on it for the past 6 months and I think the product is ready for some feedback :)

A few notes:

- Atlasphere uses a ReadOnly IAM role to scan your AWS account (my account reaches your account through a trust relationship).

- The number of services is currently limited (WIP)

- It's a macOS app

- It's NOT an Electron app, i use Rust + Webview

What am I looking for? All I really need is for someone to try the app and tell me what they like about it and what they absolutely hate about it, haha!

The website is https://atlasphere.io/

overflowy 1 hour ago | parent

Showing the pricing section after downloading the app and signing up is a dark pattern, I suggest including a pricing section on the website.

sudosteph 1 hour ago | parent

Hey, First things - I used to work for AWS, unless your job is more of an evangelist thing, or unless the policy is changed, you need get approval to share side projects. So don't get in trouble over this!

Personally, I am not comfortable with cross-account access from a stranger, even if it's read only. I feel like I should be able to run something locally on my side to gather the data so I can pick and choose what actually needs diagrams

Sounds fun though!

andreygrehov 26 minutes ago | parent

Hey! I did get approval, so fingers-crossed I'm good here :)

Yea, that cross-account trust is a good call out. I'll need to spend time thinking more about it. Is there anything i could do such that you could say: 'Well, in this case I'm fine with cross-account access from a stranger like you'?

NickNaraghi 53 minutes ago | parent

This is brilliant. I've been really excited about Jack Dorsey's "From Hierarchy to Intelligence"[0] and I think what you've got here is a pretty important piece of the puzzle.

[0] block.xyz/inside/from-hierarchy-to-intelligence