Clouds and Light Blog

A key challenge with public cloud is that knowing exactly what services you have running is often surprisingly hard to find out.

Service details are often buried in consoles and obscure command-line tools. Even when we have permission to access them it's hard to bring data together; our views are segregated by accounts, regions and split between services, so building a consolidated view of the whole infrastructure becomes complex.

Today we launch a solution to this problem. Our Live Service Discovery launches with support for 47 AWS services and 20 GCP services. Add a few lines of HTML to any web page and the platform analyses your cloud environment and embeds a live view of those services.

This opens up a range of possibilities:

• Compliance: Present real-time cloud data alongside control wording, with signed attestations captured against the live environment.
• Resilience & FinOps: Embed dynamic service data directly in recommendation documents so readers can see where improvements are needed.
• Training: Link course materials to the student's own cloud account — they can verify their work matches the course requirements without leaving the page.

Read on for worked examples, sample documents, and instructions for linking your own AWS or GCP account.

A key use case for the Clouds and Light Platform is to convert existing company documents into training, run-books and how-to guides. This can be applied to everything from creating onboarding guides for new team members to DR, BCP and incident response manuals.

It is also a very powerful platform for developing system documentation using LLMs. If you have an application or system which lacks comprehensive documentation, using an LLM agent can be a powerful way to consolidate existing data and augment it with code analysis or cloud service configuration discovery.

Equally, once a system is documented in Markup it then becomes easier to build processes and tests to verify your data is up to date. You can then create a feedback loop for updating areas which may have changed.

This blog post looks at a real world example of importing a 350 page PDF book with an online demonstration and then looks at how we can use this Markup document structure to review and validate documentation.

One challenge often faced by companies is that they have a lot of key documentation trapped in a wide variety of formats. Key runbooks may be stored in a variety of PDF and Wordprocessor formats making them hard to reliably and consistently access them.

The other challenge is that the information in the documents may go stale. How do we guarantee that the information is current and has been reviewed by its intended audience to verify that it is up to date?

Therefore we've built some new features into the Clouds and Light platform. You can now import your existing documents, in PDF form, into the platform. They are converted into Markup for easy editing in the online editor and can be viewed and saved as rich HTML documents.

The platform now supports the addition of checkpoints into any document. So it's very easy to import a document with checkpoints which state "the information above is current and correct". A reviewer can then work through the document and confirm the information in the document is still valid, with a full audit trail to show each section was viewed and validated.

If there are areas which are no longer true or need updating, the user can then request edit rights and update the document. Once it is up to date and approved it can be easily published as a rich HTML document.

You can now test this for yourself (no login required). See the full blog post for the guide and sample downloads.