Omnigraffle is an expert-grade general-purpose vector and object manipulation product. If you’re exclusively using AWS and have time to dig really deep into this it can be a great all-in-one tool. Reporting dash also offers exports to excel and CSV formats. Bottom LineĬloudcraft is a very rich AWS diagram generator, from the visual layout of architecture to reporting and analysis like cost structure. 3D layout can very quickly get a bit busy. AWS-specific, though that might not be a bad thing for you. Panning/zooming can be a little fickle, with some unintuitive features for first-time users. Good range of exports, including vector graphics. Ability to switch between 2D and 3D layout. Lots of baked-in layout features, like automatically spacing out objects across an autoscaling group shader. Good hotkeyed object search in a diagram. You can also link your AWS infrastructure to generate layouts. Offers additional context (such as the cost of a number of EC2 instances) for various points of interest on the flowchart. CloudcraftĬloudCraft is good for rendering three-dimensional layouts. However Lucidchart is a bit of a high friction product and has some responsiveness issues as a web product. Lucidchart is loaded to the brim with features and offers a bit more guidance to its use cases. Some gated features that don’t give you a great feel with the free version. Somewhat slow with lots of interstitials. Consĭiagramming and directional arrows can be a little finicky when working with small icons. Good range of export options, including vector graphics format, along with a cropping tool. There are also some intuitive shortcuts (like double-click for text) that make it a little easier to use. It has a pretty decent library of icons with a search function. Lucidchart has a good set of templates with recommendations for how to use them and use cases. Quick start based on a short questionnaire. Lucidchartįree version: Yes, up to three documents Pros Quick start that gets you straight to the tool with little account setup requirements make this a great option for putting together a quick and easy cloud diagram. Highly customizable WYSIWYG interface with little friction. The icon library is not as robust as other options, missing some native icons for Google Cloud, Alibaba, and others. You’ll find images of, well, flow charts in an “advanced” section. The interface at times can be a bit busy with icons that are not particularly well organized. You can also export your diagrams to Trello, Github, Dropbox, and Gitlab. It has a lot of seamless export options, including vector graphics format for design editing. Seamless auto-cropping tool on export based on object grouping. It also has quick sharing options for Google Drive and OneDrive. It has a search function for common shapes/icons. You’re asked three quick questions and then taken straight to several template options. Draw.ioĭraw.io is a go-to WYSIWYG cloud diagramming tool. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the top cloud diagramming tools, as well as some of their pros and cons-and our less-than-five-minute layout challenge result. The five-minute experiment did not include the sign-up or download period. Others… well, not so much, but we can see where they excel and why they’re good at what they do. Some turned out just as comprehensive as you’d expect to see on a slideshow. (It doesn’t include Visio, for example, which we still hear is wonderful.)Īs a thought experiment, we challenged ourselves to diagram the same layout in each tool in five minutes or less. This list is not exhaustive and has some bias toward tools that are quickly accessible. And we wanted to share how we felt about some of these top tools. We’ve taken a look at many of these-some more bespoke and others incredibly popular internally. And many of them are free, or have enough free features, to make your life a whole lot easier. Flow charts have filled powerpoint slideshows for decades and there’s no reason you should feel allergic to them, even if it’s cloud architecture that you’re trying to explain.Īlso, fortunately, there are an enormous number of tools out there to help you diagram your cloud architecture. You’ll probably find, instead, that a room of people watching a presentation (or your shared screen on Zoom) are going to have a much easier time understanding you if you just have a diagram. And, well, a picture is worth a thousand words anyway-even if those words have at least 5 syllables each. There’s a lot of terms to keep track of that can all feel a bit like an alphabet soup after a while. Try explaining your entire cloud infrastructure aloud in a few sentences to a room full of not-quite-as-technical-as-you team members.
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