Architecture

Simplified Architecture

This diagram shows the essential communication flow of Vulcan.

The main elements shown in the diagram are the following:

• Vulcan API: Manage teams, assets, users, scan policies and programs.
• Scan Engine: Creates checks on a schedule following scan programs.
• Agents: Execute, monitors and manage checks. Process and store results.
• VulnDB Consumer: Processes and stores results from checks on a timeline.
• VulnDB API: Provides access to catalogued issues, findings and statistics.

Notably absent from this diagram are the following elements:

• User interfaces such as the Vulcan UI, the Vulcan Core CLI, Vulcan Local...
• Communication performed by specific checks requiring third-party services.
• Network devices (balancers, proxies, gateways...) necessary for communication.
• Communication interfaces such as message queues, notification topics and stream.
• Simple microservices (result storage, check inventory, metrics...) used for specific tasks.
• Specific runtimes (e.g. AWS, Kubernetes, GCP...) that the components can run inside of.

Detailed Architecture

This diagram shows a more detailed architecture of Vulcan working in Kubernetes and AWS.

For a complete list of all the components involved in Vulcan, see the repositories page.