The practice of creating visual representations of cloud infrastructure to understand, monitor, and manage complex systems. Like using a GPS navigation app instead of written directions, infrastructure visualization transforms technical configurations into intuitive diagrams, dashboards, and maps. This includes generating architecture diagrams from code (such as Terraform), real-time infrastructure dashboards, and interactive topology maps. AWS provides CloudWatch dashboards and Architecture Center, Azure offers Azure Monitor visualization, GCP has Cloud Asset Inventory visualization, and OCI provides Console dashboards with topology views.
A DevOps team uses an infrastructure visualization tool to automatically generate a cloud architecture diagram from their Terraform files. The visual representation reveals that their production database lacks a read replica, leading them to add one before a major product launch. The visualization updates automatically as infrastructure changes are deployed.
All cloud providers offer visualization tools for monitoring and understanding infrastructure, from real-time dashboards to network topology maps.