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I would suggest that if your architecture diagrams are a bunch of icons provided by AWS/Azure/GCP with lines pointing at each other... you are doing it wrong. The 'what does this element do for my system' is vastly more important than the 'which in vogue offering from my cloud provider implements it'. I highly suggest folks take a look at the C4 Model: https://c4model.com/
I would suggest that if your architecture diagrams are a bunch of icons provided by AWS/Azure/GCP with lines pointing at each other... you are doing it wrong. The 'what does this element do for my system' is vastly more important than the 'which in vogue offering from my cloud provider implements it'. I highly suggest folks take a look at the C4 Model: https://c4model.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a useless crap. It’s an over engineered documentation framework focusing on all the wrong things so some agile consultant can sell more cool aid. I don’t trust anything that is designed someone who last did real projects in the 2000’s OOP Java enterprise craze.
It's not a hard science. Take the parts that work for your team and scrap the ones that don't.
I use draw.io for these kind of diagrams. It has symbols for most of the cloud services built in. It also maintains the arrow connections when we move around the elements. Very handy!
I use Excalidraw because I like the hand-drawn look when planning/sketching things out. If/when I make the jump to actual documentation I use Mermaid so I can keep everything tidy under source control.
I use draw.io for these kind of diagrams. It has symbols for most of the cloud services built in. It also maintains the arrow connections when we move around the elements. Very handy!
The way most people use draw.io is using cloud storage integration like Google drive, hence versioning is not possible. So far I never seen people put the draw.io produced file to Git. I'm using PlantUML in some of my projects, it solved the versioning issue. However it's lacking of lots of draw.io or even inkscape editor capability.
Why use Inkscape for this, when Dia¹ is a more dedicated diagram editor? 1. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Dia/Screenshots >
Recently discussed on HN
I would suggest that if your architecture diagrams are a bunch of icons provided by AWS/Azure/GCP with lines pointing at each other... you are doing it wrong. The 'what does this element do for my system' is vastly more important than the 'which in vogue offering from my cloud provider implements it'. I highly suggest folks take a look at the C4 Model: https://c4model.com/
This lets you produce diagrams with code.
https://d2lang.com/ This lets you produce diagrams with code.
- Can check the textual description of the diagram into version control and track how it changes over time
- Can easily diff 2 versions of the same diagram
- Adding elements to a large existing diagram using WYSIWYG tools can be tricky (eg: you may have to move or reroute existing elements to make enough space)
Another cool idea is to create multiperspective diagrams with different views for different purposes (eg: code structure, deployment, network architecture, security):
- Clarity. By breaking up diagrams into perspectives, diagram authors can bring much more clarity to a system. Individual concerns can be spread out over many perspectives, allowing each the space it needs without interfering with others.
- Extensibility. Multiperspective diagrams share a model, so creating additional perspectives from an existing diagram is incredibly easy, far easier than starting from scratch each time.
- Maintainability. A corollary to the above, individual perspectives can be modified without affecting the others. Diagrams that are easy to maintain get maintained, while diagrams that aren’t fall out of date quickly. Multiperspective diagrams greatly help in the fight to keep documentation up-to-date.
This is a cool demo: https://app.ilograph.com/demo.ilograph.Stack%2520Overflow%25...
For other textual diagramming tools and ideas, please see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37222855
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Ilograph, just stumbled onto their blog and I think they have a lot of cool ideas.