blast-radius VS inframap

‍Blast Radius is a tool designed to provide interactive visualizations of Terraform dependency graphs. It's particularly useful for understanding and communicating the architecture and potential impact of changes in Terraform-managed infrastructure.

I have tried with Blast Radius, but I was no luck here. Additionally, it looks like Blast Radius is no longer maintained.

Blast Radius is a tool for reasoning about Terraform dependency graphs with interactive visualizations. It’s an open source that is used to document infrastructure, reason relationships between resources, and learn about Terraform or one of its providers. This is a step-by-step guide on how to use Blast Radius to visualize Terraform.

Like Blast Radius, InfraMap generates visual graphs of your infrastructure based on Terraform state or configurations, offering a visual overview of your infrastructure, which is especially helpful for large and complex environments.

We also contribute to the open-source community with projects like InfraMap, that generate your infra diagram on the fly based on your tfstate or the most famous TerraCognita, a reverse Terraform.

Pretty cool. The biggest thing I think is missing from many popular diagramming tools is the ability to easily diff the architecture across changes. Although that can already be done with graphviz source files.

However, these days I prefer to just have diagrams generated from the source code itself, like:

- https://github.com/cycloidio/inframap

- https://graphviz.org/Gallery/directed/bazel.html

In order to make a compelling use case out of having to maintain a parallel definition like this, I think it needs to be able to contribute to analysis like formal verification or, despite them stating that it's not a goal, being able to create the described architecture. Or even generate something like a terraform plan. Otherwise it falls victim to the same problem as any other method of creating diagrams, that of them falling out of sync with the system.

They are a long way there already by providing a way to use a programming language backed by a large ecosystem of other tools that can be used to work with e.g. terraform, like python/go.

I used https://github.com/cycloidio/inframap last week, was a good experience for me

Inframap reads your tfstate or HCL to generate a graph specific for each provider, showing only the resources that are most important/relevant.

Also if you want to easily visualize your HCL or TFState we did https://github.com/cycloidio/inframap which will allow you to visualize those in a more easy/readable way than just JSON.