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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

#61
post #38

what if we can make these diagrams synchronized with reality. you need the diagram to pull from the same source of truth as your actual infrastructure - whether that's terraform state, kubernetes manifests, or service discovery. that way diagrams become less historical artifacts and more of living documentation

I've written something like this for NixOS a while back [1], which generates infrastructure diagrams directly from the source of truth (albeit not as pretty as isoflow). I'm sure this could be applied to other declarative tech stacks aswell!

[1]: https://github.com/oddlama/nix-topology

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

#62
post #56
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious also. The SVGs for the isoflow library of icons is in node_modules/@isoflow/isopacks/dist/isopacks.md (yes, svg within base64 within markdown)

Thank you for the parenthetical there. When I read your first line I thought, "surely they didn't.." They did.

Curious what's the argument for/against that here. I agree it's at least unusual.

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

#63
post #62
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the parenthetical there. When I read your first line I thought, "surely they didn't.." They did.

Curious what's the argument for/against that here. I agree it's at least unusual.

I don't have any good argument in either direction, if I'm being honest. Just feels.. weird.

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

#64
post #53

If you care, Snowflake launched a product called Openflow less than a month ago. Yours will probably be very difficult to discover.

There's also a network telemetry protocol called OpenFlow that every network engineer knows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFlow

I was going to note the same thing. The networking openflow is the first hit on google and bing; why do people not websearch?

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

#65
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a network telemetry protocol called OpenFlow that every network engineer knows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFlow

I was going to note the same thing. The networking openflow is the first hit on google and bing; why do people not websearch?

"OpenRouter" is another one that drives me nuts.

"You mean FRR?" https://frrouting.org/

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

#66
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just not post if your criticism is mean spirited.

It wasn't mean spirited but now I can see it that indeed it came out as such. Apologies. And thanks for pointing it out!

Nah, its okay. I too think beautiful is used too often in contexts where it feels exaggerated. Nature can be beautiful. People can be beautiful. But a blue and grey computer diagram? It certainly looks good to me but I would not use the word beautiful. Perhaps if it were exceptionally artistic using a unique aesthetic I would use that word. But that's just like, my opinion, man.

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

#67
post #33

This looks amazing. I find Mermaid.js ugly and the syntax difficult/buggy but unfortunately it's one of the best supported diagram tools in static site generators. It'd be awesome to have Isoflow diagrams embedded in Markdown like that.

I love the idea of mermaid but the syntax is somewhat convolutes and the integrations in tools like GitLab are very unstable.

That's more of a takedown of whoever built the Gitlab tool than Mermaid itself.

In the world where LLM's are very good at mermaid diagrams is the syntax even that terribly important?

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

#68
post #53

If you care, Snowflake launched a product called Openflow less than a month ago. Yours will probably be very difficult to discover.

There's also a network telemetry protocol called OpenFlow that every network engineer knows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFlow

This is immediately what I thought of. Terrible name collision.

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

#69
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the idea of mermaid but the syntax is somewhat convolutes and the integrations in tools like GitLab are very unstable.

That's more of a takedown of whoever built the Gitlab tool than Mermaid itself. In the world where LLM's are very good at mermaid diagrams is the syntax even that terribly important?

What a terrible take

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

#70
post #2

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!

I'm not very familiar with Node.js. Any idea where in isoflow's code are the graphics for those 3D-style icons? Are they SVG or what? Is it possible to add custom icons?

The docs for the icons: https://isoflow.io/docs/isopacks

Collections of SVGs for the icons: https://github.com/markmanx/isopacks/tree/main/collections

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