Simulation
Simulation overview
Understand the difference between canvas planning, Terraform preview, deployment, history, and live infrastructure.
Simulation areas
- New Simulation is where you design infrastructure on a visual canvas.
- Terraform Preview shows generated infrastructure code before deployment.
- Deployment Status shows live progress and logs.
- Simulation History stores drafts and deployment records.
- Live Infrastructure shows resources that already exist in your cloud account.
Simulation service catalog
| Category | AWS Service | Azure Equivalent | GCP Equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute (VMs) | EC2 | Virtual Machine | Compute Engine |
| Object Storage | S3 | Storage Account | Cloud Storage |
| Block Storage | EBS | Managed Disk | Persistent Disk |
| Relational DB | RDS | Azure SQL Database | Cloud SQL |
| NoSQL DB | DynamoDB | N/A | N/A |
| Serverless Functions | Lambda | Function App | Cloud Run Function |
| Container Orchestrator | ECS / EKS | AKS | GKE |
| Container Registry | ECR | Azure Container Registry | Artifact Registry |
| API Gateway | API Gateway | N/A | N/A |
| Virtual Network | VPC | Virtual Network | VPC Network |
| Access Control / Firewall | Security Group | Network Security Group | Firewall Rule |
| Load Balancing | Elastic Load Balancer / Target Group | Load Balancer / Backend Address Pool | Cloud Load Balancer / Backend Service |
| Auto Scaling | Auto Scaling Group | VM Scale Set | Managed Instance Group |
| Static IP Address | Elastic IP | Public IP | External Address |
| Content Delivery (CDN) | CloudFront | CDN or Front Door | Cloud CDN |
| Third-party Registries | Docker Hub | Docker Hub | Docker Hub |
| Version Control | GitHub | GitHub | GitHub |
Canvas vs real resources
Adding nodes to a canvas is planning. Deploying a simulation can create real cloud resources. Deleting a saved canvas does not destroy deployed infrastructure.
Destroy is separate from delete
Use the destroy workflow for deployed simulation resources. Delete only removes the saved design from CloudWatcher.
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If your team still runs into setup issues, empty dashboards, billing delays, callback failures, or alerting problems, continue with troubleshooting before re-running the entire onboarding flow.