Link to Github repo: https://github.com/awslabs/diagram-maker
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Diagram Maker: Open sourcing IoT visualization
41–50 of 64 posts
Re: Diagram Maker: Open sourcing IoT visualization
#42Given that AWS continues to spin out more and more purpose-built technology as needs come up, I wonder whether AWS's long-term strategy is to: - Continue to spin out products to support common business use cases. - Expose commonly used functionality from products via this WYSIWYG tool. - Allow drag and drop programming by connecting services. - Lambdas are the primary way that a business bridges gaps between OOB func…
I'm thinking the same. If this happens, it will be amazing.
Re: Diagram Maker: Open sourcing IoT visualization
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. When a tool like this can actually "compose" a dataflow using cloud native components (lamdbas, messaging, storage) in real time, this has potential to be super powerful. Think of, for example, Apache NiFi [1] but instead of the components being constrained to a single JVM execution, the components are realized as AWS or Azure services. That "operational view" of your architecture would be super neat, especial…
That's honestly eerily close to what is in my head with what we're building for Refinery. It's a rough nut to crack but we're trying! https://refinery.io
Whoa this is pretty cool!
Re: Diagram Maker: Open sourcing IoT visualization
#44I've tried so many of these diagramming tools (mermaid, draw.io, figma, lucid chart). But none of them seem to ever match the effectiveness and simplicity of PowerPoint. Why reinvent the wheel so many times?
I use yEd [0] for live editing in meetings. It has auto-layout. Not intuitive but faster to use than everything else. The web version is easier.
Re: Diagram Maker: Open sourcing IoT visualization
#45I've tried so many of these diagramming tools (mermaid, draw.io, figma, lucid chart). But none of them seem to ever match the effectiveness and simplicity of PowerPoint. Why reinvent the wheel so many times?
I wouldn't put Diagram Maker in the same bucket as these tools. These tools can be used directly by an End user for drawing diagrams via drag & drop or via markdown. Diagram Maker on the other hand empowers application developers to embed a tool where end users can create diagrams by drag & drop within their applications.
Some of the reasons why an application developer might prefer using Diagram Maker over using draw.io's embed mode in their application: * You want to customize the editor to match your application's styling. * You want the editor to impose your application's custom semantics, for example: your application doesn't allow cycles.
Re: Diagram Maker: Open sourcing IoT visualization
#46Tools like this can be very useful in supporting operational use cases in addition to documentation. The tricky part with cloud is how to effectively visualize infrastructure that is composed of a variety of services and attributes. If you have a VPC in each of two regions with dynamodb, s3, ecs, alb, third party providers with access via cross account roles, etc etc it gets tricky to sensibly lay out and demonstrate…
It is impossible to express all of the relevant information about an architecture in a single view. That's why a diagramming tool that natively supports multiple views/perspectives is a must-have. Anything less is just a toy, frankly.
> It is impossible to express all of the relevant information about an architecture in a single view.
Yet lots of people have been doing it, successfully, for decades with pen and paper (equivalent). I think you need to constrain your use case from "all architectures" to whatever it is you are trying to describe.
Re: Diagram Maker: Open sourcing IoT visualization
#47Shameless plug: If you're looking to develop a web app with diagramming functionality and need considerably more features, I make GoJS: https://gojs.net/latest/index.html
In addition to basic stuff like zooming and moving nodes GoJS has undo management, data binding, templates, lots of built in tools and layouts and a large showcase of customizations of each, animations, palettes, overviews, etc. It's not free, but if you're looking to use a library to buy developer time, I think it's a much better deal than this offering.
Re: Diagram Maker: Open sourcing IoT visualization
#48If you want something not-Amazon, try Whimsical.com or miro.com (I adore Whimsical though)
Re: Diagram Maker: Open sourcing IoT visualization
#49Shameless plug: If you're looking to develop a web app with diagramming functionality and need considerably more features, I make GoJS: https://gojs.net/latest/index.html In addition to basic stuff like zooming and moving nodes GoJS has undo management, data binding, templates, lots of built in tools and layouts and a large showcase of customizations of each, animations, palettes, overviews, etc. It's not free, but i…
How much pushback/confusion do you get on the naming of this, given that Golang seems to have taken over all the other go names?
Re: Diagram Maker: Open sourcing IoT visualization
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is impossible to express all of the relevant information about an architecture in a single view. That's why a diagramming tool that natively supports multiple views/perspectives is a must-have. Anything less is just a toy, frankly.
> It is impossible to express all of the relevant information about an architecture in a single view. Yet lots of people have been doing it, successfully, for decades with pen and paper (equivalent). I think you need to constrain your use case from "all architectures" to whatever it is you are trying to describe.
While I totally agree, I think we rely on people just making sense of the diagram based on context.
Say you're diagraming the architecture of the aforementioned app and you have your VPCs and your ELBs and compute and subnets and IGW and tidy little boxes containing them all to indicate this is everything in prod AWS account, us-west-1. Then you need to add an S3 bucket and dynamo db table. Most people would just drop a bucket icon outside of the VPC and label it...maybe dynamodb sits inside the region box and s3 kind of straddles it. Good enough conceptually to talk through the design.
Now imagine you want to automate the process of generating that view (or the associated resource graph) automatically. That's where it gets tricky. Tons of service-specific rules start to come into play. Kind of a mess.