Show HN: CloudSkew – Draw AWS, Azure, GCP, K8s architecture diagrams • Hacker News Board

etxm wrote: post #24

Export/import/sync PlantUML would be awesome. Does anyone know a visual diagramming tool with diagrams as code support? I’ve seen some with basic PlantUML importing.

Try mingrammer (not entirely sure if that supports plantUML conversion though).

Re: Show HN: CloudSkew – Draw AWS, Azure, GCP, K8s architecture diagrams

#26

Post by mithunshanbhag » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 2:23 PM UTC

chessmango wrote: post #18

mithunshanbhag wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. While there are many tools for sketching flowcharts, mind-maps, UML diagrams etc, cloudskew has cloud architecture diagrams as its sole focus. Also planning your cloud architecture requires several round-trips between your drawing tool, document editor (for architecture documentation), looking up reference architectures, googling for AWS documentation (for resource docs, pricing details etc). CloudSkew…

These are all pretty killer. For non-generalist stuff this is great - I work for AWS myself and arch diagrams are generally draw.io for me, and considering this is a web service I'd be unlikely to use it but in another life, absolutely. I feel like non-generalist tools like this are useful for exactly what they're good at, especially along with doc links etc. Any plans to do this cool things like Cloudcraft with desc…

Thanks.

1. Does your team/org maintain a central diagram repository? Or do team members use their diagram tool of choice and then export diagram into a central doc library (e.g. github markdown)?

2. The short-term plan is to add more diagram templates (e.g. VPCs, K8s clusters) to help folks author complex architectures quickly.

3. There are plans to release a paid enterprise version later in the year with features like SSO, customer-managed-encryption-keys, customer-managed-storage, team collaboration etc.

Overall, CloudSkew will remain focused on cloud diagram only.

Re: Show HN: CloudSkew – Draw AWS, Azure, GCP, K8s architecture diagrams

#27

Post by ciguy » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

Looks really nice, similar to draw.io but a bit cleaner designs. I would recommend making the default sign up flow friendlier to AWS and GCP users. Right now figuring out how to add those libraries is hard.

Also I would highly recommend more top level groups (AWS, Azure etc...) instead of having each type of service for each cloud on a new side tab. Basically make it more hierarchical.

Finally, make everything collapsed by default. Having dozens of tabs expanded on start is annoying to say the least.

Re: Show HN: CloudSkew – Draw AWS, Azure, GCP, K8s architecture diagrams

#28

Post by mithunshanbhag » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

ciguy wrote: post #27

Looks really nice, similar to draw.io but a bit cleaner designs. I would recommend making the default sign up flow friendlier to AWS and GCP users. Right now figuring out how to add those libraries is hard. Also I would highly recommend more top level groups (AWS, Azure etc...) instead of having each type of service for each cloud on a new side tab. Basically make it more hierarchical. Finally, make everything collap…

Good points. Will add this to my backlog.

PS: The search box (on top of the icon palette) should make things a bit easier. For some icons, it can even search with synonyms (e.g. search for 'nosql' will show 'mongodb'). However this is not consistent across all cloud provider icons currently.

Re: Show HN: CloudSkew – Draw AWS, Azure, GCP, K8s architecture diagrams

#29

Post by xwdv » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

mithunshanbhag wrote: post #23

xwdv wrote: post #22

Export to ASCII would be awesome

Cool, yes. Adds business value, no :-)

The value is in the marketing, capturing the developer crowds attention

Re: Show HN: CloudSkew – Draw AWS, Azure, GCP, K8s architecture diagrams

#30

Post by chessmango » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 3:47 PM UTC

mithunshanbhag wrote: post #26

chessmango wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all pretty killer. For non-generalist stuff this is great - I work for AWS myself and arch diagrams are generally draw.io for me, and considering this is a web service I'd be unlikely to use it but in another life, absolutely. I feel like non-generalist tools like this are useful for exactly what they're good at, especially along with doc links etc. Any plans to do this cool things like Cloudcraft with desc…

Thanks. 1. Does your team/org maintain a central diagram repository? Or do team members use their diagram tool of choice and then export diagram into a central doc library (e.g. github markdown)? 2. The short-term plan is to add more diagram templates (e.g. VPCs, K8s clusters) to help folks author complex architectures quickly. 3. There are plans to release a paid enterprise version later in the year with features li…

1. Yes/no - my own team is more the latter as I'm more customer-facing and lone-ranger-y, but other teams do a lot more collab and keep things central. As far as I'm aware though, it's a bit of a mixed bag, so getting to the point where we're all on the same page would be fantastic.

2. This sounds great. I like the k8s angle particularly as well - I have yet to find much useful in that area, so having a service that's good at it would be wonderful.

3. This I'd imagine would be end-game at AWS. Specifically ability to handle own storage and keys would be an immediate sell here. We've just taken on Slack Enterprise Grid for basically this (granted this was a 2-way deal: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280829/slack-amazon-aws-...) so clearly we're up for it :D

I get the focus though. Seems like a good opportunity to set yourself up as best-in-class for this type of thing. I'll certainly be using CloudSkew for anything I need privately. :)