CloudCover

The front-facing webpage in all its glory
Tech stack diagram ... in 3D!
Tech stack as visualized from the POV of root

https://github.com/ajwang34/stacksonstacks

Inspiration

As Chance the Rapper once said,

“It go like count that stack,”

But today, massive technological applications are built in the cloud with huge numbers of resources. Their data flow won’t fit on a sheet of paper or a whiteboard. How can we ever hope to count, or visualize such a stack?

What it does:

CloudCover converts terraform files into a 3D experience. Users upload Terraform files, which are parsed and used to generate coordinates to display in VR. Users can view the stack on their mobile devices through VR and edit in desktop mode, all using intuitive, video-game-like controls.

But how?

Threejs and WebVR supported the frontend, while Google Cloud Platforms and NodeJS powered the backend.

Challenges I ran into

Generating the coordinates was difficult because we could not find an API to generate an orderly initial layout of all the resources. We used terraform’s built-in graph function to generate 2D coordinates, but had difficulties parsing for WebVR.

Getting a sane way of cross-platform rendering for mobile and desktop devices was tedious and headache inducing; luckily we had lots of edible coffee beans at our disposal.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Ability to view the same browser on mobile and desktop devices alike, taking advantage of their respective functionalities
Drag-n-drop feature to move objects in 3D space
Building mechanics that I actually had fun playing around with
Parsed complex Terraform files to generate graphs for a 3D visualization

What we learned

Coffee bean taste good
Static websites can be served directly from buckets
How to use GCP resources for the first time
Compute Engines are not readily scalable as App Engines are
Terraform, Tesseract, Tensorflow, Text file, and Typescript all sound the same when you haven’t slept in 24 hours
CloudCover is such an unremarkable name that anyone who hears it instantly develops amnesia, even qualified judges