diagrams-patterns

• diagrams should only used for managing the basic shapes of the cloud components
• but there are standard patterns usually used in cloud architecture, we don't need to draw them from scratch
• e.g. VPC with public/private subnets, NAT gateway, etc.

diagrams-patterns is a collection of patterns for diagrams that can be reused in different projects.

Features

• aws vpc, subnets with styles
  • 
• aws overlapping az on subnets
  • calculate the position based on the number of az and subnets
  • store and reuse the calculated position
  • 
• aws grid subnets with az
  • use 'anchor', a hidden node, to align the subnets
  • not really work
  • 
• dsl investigate
  • dsl 2 py 2 diagrams (refer to d2)

Roadmap

Currently, the diagrams-patterns and diagrams-exporters are built as 'diagrams'-extensions. But since the diagrams is inactive, introducing new tools is a necessary step, e.g. d2.

At that time, the diagrams-patterns should be a standalone tool, which provide a standard DSL to describe the common patterns in cloud architecture (or other kinds of diagrams). Then, you can translate the DSL to different tools, e.g. diagrams, d2, etc.

The diagrams-exporters plays another role to facilitate with productive tools, e.g. terraform, aws cli, etc. It read the metadata, convert to DSL, then generate the diagrams.

A possible structure is:

flowchart BT
  subgraph diagram-exporters
    terraform-exporter
    awscli-exporter
    kubectl-exporter
  end

  subgraph diagrams-patterns
    subgraph common-patterns
      c4-pattern
      layer-arch-pattern    
    end

    subgraph cloud-patterns
      aws-pattern
      azure-pattern
    end

    subgraph dsl
      dsl-parser

      dsl-to-diagrams
      dsl-to-d2
      dsl-to-mermaid
    end
  end

  diagrams-patterns --> diagram-exporters
  diagrams --> diagrams-patterns
  d2 --> diagrams-patterns
  plantuml --> diagrams-patterns
  
  graphviz --> diagrams
  graphviz --> d2

  plantuml

Reference

• graphviz & dot

  • https://github.com/pydot/pydot

• d2

  • https://github.com/terrastruct/d2
  • https://github.com/MrBlenny/py-d2

• read tfstate and generate graph

  • https://github.com/cycloidio/inframap
  • https://github.com/28mm/blast-radius

• read aws cli and generate graph

  • https://github.com/Cloud-Architects/cloudiscovery

• other terraform interesting tools

  • https://github.com/cycloidio/terracost
  • https://pypi.org/project/python-hcl2/