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OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine

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Re: OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine

#2

Post by x0z »

I've not done anything special here, just wrapped the community edition of ISOFLOW https://github.com/markmanx/isoflow and made it dead easy to set up and run. You can now export and load JSON backups of your diagrams allowing you to essentially have as many as you want, which the community version of ISOFLOW restricts. Enjoy!

Re: OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine

#3

Post by martypitt »

Diagrams look great - well done.

Reminds me of a similar project years ago that was doing the same thing - they ultimately struggled with monetization and folded (I forget the name) -- however this one is MIT OSS, so I'm guessing that's not a key concern right now.

Note that your "Built with the Isoflow library" link at the bottom to isoflow 404's to https://github.com/isoflow/isoflow

Re: OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine

#4

Post by x0z »

martypitt wrote: post #3

Diagrams look great - well done. Reminds me of a similar project years ago that was doing the same thing - they ultimately struggled with monetization and folded (I forget the name) -- however this one is MIT OSS, so I'm guessing that's not a key concern right now. Note that your "Built with the Isoflow library" link at the bottom to isoflow 404's to https://github.com/isoflow/isoflow

Thanks! I can't take any credit at all for the icons/design that's all Isoflow, but their community edition is designed to steer you to the pro version.

No plans at all for money making, just want people to enjoy using it.

Thank you for pointing out the link, I'll get on that ;)

Re: OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine

#8

Post by 9dev »

This is a little tangential, but I've wondered for a while if there's a better way to visualise the composition of software systems.

Often, there's not only a single way to look at one: There's a user interaction flow through components, but those components also consist of hardware; the hardware might be virtual and composed of several, spread, sub-components, or even containers. You can go down this path pretty deep, and arrive at several different representations of the system that are either impossible to visualise at the same time, or make it incomprehensible.

Ideally, I would want to have a way to document different facets of the system individually, but linked to each other, and be able to change my perspective at anytime. This would allow to flip between UX, network traffic, firewall boundaries, program flow, logical RPC flow, and so on; all while being able to view connected components for a given component at anytime. For example, inspecting an application, then viewing its network ports, then its runtime container, the hypervisor the container runs on, the cloud provider that sits in, and so on.

My idea so far is a graph database that contains all components and the edges between them. The tool would have to be as extensible as possible, so using something like HCL to describe the graph would be great, with extensions for all kinds of components and edges. And finally a viewer to render visual representations of one or more composable layers to flick through, and export etc.

I never got around to working on it yet, but if anyone else had the same idea, I'd be open to collaborating :)

Re: OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine

#9

Post by alixanderwang »

9dev wrote: post #8

This is a little tangential, but I've wondered for a while if there's a better way to visualise the composition of software systems. Often, there's not only a single way to look at one: There's a user interaction flow through components, but those components also consist of hardware; the hardware might be virtual and composed of several, spread, sub-components, or even containers. You can go down this path pretty dee…

At least for the layering + using text aspect, D2 support this:

defining diagrams as multiple layers like so

  x -> y

  layers: {
    inside_x: {
      a -> b
    }
  }
A fleshed out example hosted on our web service: https://app.terrastruct.com/diagrams/664641071
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