Description
Holori is a French startup based in Toulouse offering a cloud infrastructure management software.
You can easily build cloud architecture diagrams, visualize or edit existing diagrams, import and export cloud infrastructure using Terraform and manage your whole cloud infrastructure from a single window.
Ambition
How might we create an easy and intuitive cloud management and diagramming tool for cloud architects to build their diagrams effortlessly? Our goal is to provide all the necessary pieces to simplify the process of diagramming, allowing architects to focus on the bigger picture of their cloud infrastructure.
Solution
UX/UI
Branding
Role
UX/UI designer
Collaborators
Victor Pasche
Challenge
As cloud architecture grows in complexity, it's important for architects to have a tool that streamlines their workflow.
How might we simplify this process?
Research
With the advancement of cloud technology, managing complex infrastructure has become a crucial task for engineers. However, creating and updating infrastructure diagrams can be time-consuming and take away from other important tasks.
But why is creating diagrams and updating them so important for cloud architects?
Here are some of the main reasons:
Better Understanding: Visual representation of your cloud infrastructure helps understand relationships between different components, especially when taking on new client cloud accounts.
Easier Communication: Diagrams make it easier to communicate complex ideas about your cloud infrastructure to non-technical stakeholders, new engineers, external consultants or other teams.
Capacity Planning: Diagrams help plan for future capacity needs, ensuring that your cloud infrastructure can handle increasing demand.
Improved Collaboration: Clear pictures of your cloud infrastructure facilitate collaboration between teams, ensuring everyone is working towards the same goals and understands the impact of network changes.
Faster Troubleshooting: Diagrams quickly identify the source of issues, reducing downtime and pinpointing unexpected issues.
Compliance: Diagrams demonstrate compliance with regulations or industry standards, which can be mandatory in certain industries.
Key findings
Based on our secondary research, survey, and interviews, we discovered that diagramming tools often lack intuitiveness and speed, leading to significant time investment by cloud architects to create and update diagrams for their clients. Additionally, most tools in the market do not offer exporting or importing options in code, exacerbating the situation. Furthermore, some tools only work with specific environments, forcing users to select either AWS, Azure, or GCP, limiting their flexibility.
Opportunity
Holori offers a unique combination of features that are not available from its competitors. These include drag-and-drop functionality, easy text and shape creation, managing the cost of your infrastructures, importing and exporting infrastructures in code, collaborative capabilities, and the ability to work simultaneously with the main cloud environments, such as AWS, GCP, and Azure.
Implementing these features in their diagramming and managing cloud architecture MVP was key for our design.
We compared the other tools in the market in terms of visual design and workflow, and developed a mid-fidelity prototype. We then tested this prototype with users to validate our assumptions and hypotheses based on our previous research.
In addition, consulting with developers to understand what was technically feasible was an important step in this process.
Key findings
The implementation of the features was more than possible and the company was eager for us to design an intuitive organization and workflow.
Also, the company already offered a Calculator service to estimate the cost of what would be needed on the cloud infrastructure, so we took the opportunity and merged both workflows in our design.
Test Results
Our mid-fi was well received and understood. After some tweaks in our mid-fi such as labels on certain buttons or how to show certain insights of the assets Holori provides, we were ready to move forward.
Introducing Holori
Our Holori MVP provides all the features the users needed: drag-and-drop functionality, easy text and shape creation, managing the cost of your infrastructures, importing and exporting infrastructures in code, collaborative capabilities, and the ability to work simultaneously with the main cloud environments, such as AWS, GCP, and Azure.
Different cloud services
Compare prices for the different cloud services you hired across multiple environments, either separately or all at once.
Dashboard visualization
Effortlessly visualize and comprehend the price on various components of your cloud infrastructure, along with their respective prices.
Light and dark mode
We introduced a dark mode feature to our cloud diagramming tool to reduce eye strain during long hours of diagramming.
Drag-and-drop your assets
Choose your assets from the left tab or from the cart of items previously selected from the Calculator tool Holori already provides. You can also filter by provider.
Essential diagramming tools
The top bar provides quick access to tools like "duplicate", "delete", "group", "fit-to", and "rearrange" to help you create and modify your cloud diagram.
Check details easily
To access the details of your assets, simply click on any of them once in the diagram and check them in the right tab, where you can make any necessary changes.
Access the code and its settings
You can access the code generated from your diagram in the “Design” tab and also access a variety of settings for further customization.
Change anything you need
The code you add here will modify your diagram as it is interconnected to the diagram you are building in the “Design” tab, so feel free to change it where you want!
Export and share
You can export and share your diagram in various file formats, including .png, .svg, and .jpg, as well as export it as code for further customization.
Browse between your projects, choose the recent ones or create teams.
In the Home section, you can create new projects, access your recent projects, create a new team, access a variety of pre-built templates to help you get started, and even explore the Education tab to gain a better understanding of the tool and its features.
Once inside the team, you can create projects to start collaborating.
In the Team section, you can create a new team and customize its name as per your preference. Within each team, you can create multiple projects and invite your collaborators to work together with you seamlessly.
Easily change between views and drag-and-drop your assets.
On the top, you can change between views:
Design: where you will be able to visually edit and create your cloud diagram as needed via drag-and-drop.
Estimate: where you will be able to see the price of your hired services.
Deploy: where you will be able to access the code and modify it. This will change the diagram also in the Design view.
Change the theme to your liking and use the essential tools on the top bar.
We have included dark and light themes to provide comfortable viewing options and reduce eye strain.
Additionally, essential editing tools are easily accessible from the top menu for quick modifications.
In the deploy section, modify the code as you need
At Holori, the ability to modify and view the diagram as code was a crucial feature. This function is easily accessible here.
And then import and export it through Terraform
Importing and exporting your diagrams as code is also possible from here through Terraform.