What-If Simulator

Preview the impact of infrastructure changes before applying them. Test migration plans, security group changes, and decommissioning scenarios safely.

Overview

The What-If Simulator lets you model infrastructure changes in a safe, isolated environment. By creating a simulated version of your graph with proposed changes applied, you can see the full impact before executing any real modifications.

Safe exploration

The simulator never modifies your live infrastructure. All changes exist only in the simulation context, making it safe for exploring even destructive scenarios.

Simulation scenarios

The simulator supports a wide range of change scenarios:

Scenario	Description
Resource removal	Simulate removing a resource to see what breaks
Security group change	Modify ingress/egress rules and see affected resources
Migration plan	Move resources between scopes, VPCs, or regions
Scaling change	Scale up or down and see dependent resource impact
Provider migration	Simulate migrating from one provider to another
Tag change	Update tags and see policy compliance impact

How it works

Select baseline -- choose a current or historical graph snapshot as your starting point
Define changes -- specify resource additions, removals, or modifications
Run simulation -- the system creates a simulated graph with changes applied
Analyze impact -- review impacted resources, dependency changes, and policy violations
Compare -- side-by-side comparison of baseline vs. simulated state
Export -- export the simulation plan as a change request for execution

# Run a what-if simulation
POST /api/v1/simulate
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "baseline": "latest",
  "changes": [
    {
      "action": "remove",
      "resource_id": "sg-abc123"
    },
    {
      "action": "modify",
      "resource_id": "sg-xyz789",
      "properties": {
        "ingress": [
          {
            "protocol": "tcp",
            "port": 443,
            "cidr": "10.0.0.0/8"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

Use cases

Change planning -- validate change requests before CAB approval
Decommission planning -- understand the full impact of retiring a resource
Security group audit -- test the effect of tightening security group rules
Migration validation -- validate that a migration plan will not break critical dependencies
Disaster recovery testing -- simulate failover scenarios without actual disruption
Cost impact -- estimate cost impact of scaling or migration changes

Limitations

Graph only -- the simulator models graph impact, not runtime behavior (latency, throughput, etc.)
Static analysis -- simulations are based on the current graph state, not dynamic runtime conditions
External dependencies -- changes to external services not in the graph are not modeled

Combine with impact analysis

For deeper analysis, export simulation results to the impact analysis engine for AI-generated impact summaries and remediation suggestions.