Blast Radius

overlayfs:

Blast Radius is a tool for reasoning about Terraform dependency graphs with interactive visualizations.

Use Blast Radius to:

• Learn about Terraform or one of its providers through real examples
• Document your infrastructure
• Reason about relationships between resources and evaluate changes to them
• Interact with the diagrams below (and many others) in the docs

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Blast Radius

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Prerequisites

• Python 3.7 or newer
• Terraform 0.12.x or newer

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Quickstart

For fastest way to get up and running with blast-radius is as follows:

• Download and install the wheel files from the release

  copy the blastradius/server/static/images folder to the terraform directory
  

  install the wheel file

  easy_install blastradius-0.1.25.1-py3-none-any.whl
  

  or

  pip3 blastradius-0.1.25.1-py3-none-any.whl
  

• Enrich the Blast Radius diagrams with the outcome of Terraform plan actions:

  terraform plan --out tfplan.binary
  terraform show -json tfplan.binary > tfplan.json
  

  for including cost and policy information into blast-radius cost.json and policy.json file need to be stored into the working directory.

• Once installed just point Blast Radius at any initialized Terraform directory:

  blast-radius --serve /path/to/terraform/directory

• Go to the browser link http://127.0.0.1:5000/ to view the Blast Radius diagram for the terraform file.

  

  The enrichments include - information from the Plan file, State file , cost file and time file . Click the columns adjacent to the Resource Names to view these enrichment in the side panel view.

  

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Build your own wheel file

• Create wheel file of this repo

  python3 setup.py sdist bdist_wheel

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Docker

To launch Blast Radius for a local directory by manually running:

• create a dockerhub account

  docker build -t <dockerhub_username>/blast-radius:v1 .
  docker push <dockerhub_username>/blast-radius:v1

  docker run --cap-add=SYS_ADMIN -dit -p 5000:5000 -v <path>:/data:ro <dockerhub_username>/blast-radius:v1

Docker configurations

Terraform module links are saved as absolute paths in relative to the project root (note .terraform/modules/<uuid>). Given these paths will vary betwen Docker and the host, we mount the volume as read-only, assuring we don't ever interfere with your real environment.

However, in order for Blast Radius to actually work with Terraform, it needs to be initialized as well as planned compulsory. To accomplish this, the container creates an overlayfs that exists within the container, overlaying your own, so that it can operate independently. To do this, certain runtime privileges are required -- specifically --cap-add=SYS_ADMIN.

Docker & Subdirectories

If you organized your Terraform project using stacks and modules, Blast Radius must be called from the project root and reference them as subdirectories -- don't forget to prefix --serve!

For example, let's create a Terraform project with the following:

$ tree -d
`-- project/
    |-- modules/
    |   |-- foo
    |   |-- bar
    |   `-- dead
    `-- stacks/
        `-- beef/
             `-- .terraform

It consists of 3 modules foo, bar and dead, followed by one beef stack. To apply Blast Radius to the beef stack, you would want to run the container with the following:

$ cd project
$ docker run --cap-add=SYS_ADMIN -dit  -p 5000:5000 -v <pathofdirectory>:/data:ro <dockerhub_username>/blast-radius:v1

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Embedded Figures

You may wish to embed figures produced with Blast Radius in other documents. You will need the following:

1. An svg file and json document representing the graph and its layout.
2. javascript and css found in .../blastradius/server/static
3. A uniquely identified DOM element, where the <svg> should appear.

You can read more details in the documentation

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Implementation Details

Blast Radius uses the [Graphviz][] package to layout graph diagrams, [hcl] to parse Terraform configuration, and d3.js to implement interactive features and animations.

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Further Reading

The development of Blast Radius is documented in a series of blog posts:

• part 1: motivations, d3 force-directed layouts vs. vanilla graphviz.
• part 2: d3-enhanced graphviz layouts, meaningful coloration, animations.
• part 3: limiting horizontal sprawl, supporting modules.
• part 4: search, pan/zoom, prune-to-selection, docker.

A catalog of example Terraform configurations, and their dependency graphs can be found here.

• AWS two-tier architecture
• AWS networking (featuring modules)
• Google two-tier architecture
• Azure load-balancing with 2 vms

These examples are drawn primarily from the examples/ directory distributed with various Terraform providers, and aren't necessarily ideal. Additional examples, particularly demonstrations of best-practices, or of multi-cloud configurations strongly desired.