Show HN: Ilograph – Interactive AWS Serverless Architecture Diagram | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Ilograph – Interactive AWS Serverless Architecture Diagram

app.ilograph.com

72 pointsVeuxdo17 comments

Interesting, here is my feedback:

- why am I unable to select text on the site

- who is the intended audience for this product?

- When will this be available? You mention "early 2019"; I'd argue we are past that point. You should update this to clarify for users. I'm pretty much done giving my email to join a waitlist.

- can users explore the existing AWS collection of serverless applications?

Hey, thanks for your feedback. It definitely shouldn't say "early" 2019 anywhere, just 2019. I'll update. Private beta had begun already, with the first invites having gone out, so do sign up if you're interested.

Ilograph is for system, software, network and other engineers looking for a diagramming platform that is more robust and precise than existing drag-and-drop offerings. In fact, the multi-perspective capability of ilographs lets engineers from different disciplines share their unique views of a single system.

By default, text isn't selectable by design; this was done so things like buttons and nav elements don't get highlighted. You should be able to select most text in the diagrams themselves, including notes and the source, but I'll look at making more things selectable.

I'm not sure I understand your last question. I can't make the AWS resources themselves public for browsing, I don't think.

Anyway, thanks again for checking it out and for your feedback!

> Ilograph is for system, software, network and other engineers looking for a diagramming platform

I'm actively looking for a tool for this. Any recommendations while we wait for your tool to exit beta?

There are quality diagramming tools out there, but none like this that I know of. Email me (beta@ilograph.com) for a beta account.

This has been here before right? But as I recall the last one this is a much bigger more involved demo. (Still) Looks great!

Idea: hook into terraform somehow, so a certain amount (boxes and nesting) can be automated; of course user's still going to need to add the relationships between them / annotations like 'PUT login' and whatever.

edit: ah, yes, found the previously shared demo from a link I sent to a colleague - https://app.ilograph.com/demo.Drupal%20on%20AWS ; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19104734

Hey, you're exactly right about Terraform (any CF). It could definitely just extract the resources as a tree and let the user create perspectives for them. Consider it on the roadmap :)

And yeah, those are mine. This demo is a little more focused and shows off the source (people asked last time) and other new features, so I hope it's kosher.

I think the rules are generally if there's something new to show, it's cool to Show it. Definitely interesting to see the YAML that generates it; pretty minimal, it's nice.

I'm certainly glad to be reminded about it, and I've joined the waiting list this time! (Maybe I did last time too, but I assume it can't hurt. It'd be great for putting things together as I go, starting a new job next week... ;) )

Cool, thanks. Look for an invite in the next day or so.

This is a fantastic way to visualize AWS architecture. Well done! Is there a way to use it for my own architecture?

Not the author, but if you expand the left-hand sidebar you can see it's all generated from YAML, so you can use it for whatever you want; even something nothing to do with web services, if it can be visualised as nested boxes with arrows between them.

Definitely. As OJFord said, it can be used for any type of architecture.

Multi-level visualization of a tech stack with perspectives and semantic zoom.Nice!

Two questions: 1. How do you plan to handle the scale of real-world applications, ie really deep hierarchies, really long "call stacks"? 2. Will you support actual graphs with loops at some point, or will ilographs be trees?

Hey, cheers, very astute questions.

1) Yep, I have a plan to implement "collapsed" nodes when zoomed out of large perspectives. This is pretty straightforward when resources are nested since you can just show the parent node (and an indicator that there are children). Also, when a perspective gets too large or busy, you can always make another!

2) Trees work best in perspectives of course, but there is some support for loops (see https://app.ilograph.com/Git%2520Webhooks%2520on%2520AWS/Exe...). There's no perfect way to display generic graphs with loops, so I'm still experimenting with the algorithm to lay them out.

Nice.. your chevrons don't seem to display, but my org might be blocking fonts...

Will it be possible to run this internally, as in, inside a firewall? Might be useful for enterprise customers.

Hey, it could definitely be your org, but I'll investigate fallbacks if the icons fail to load. Thanks for the heads up.

Right now ilograph is a SaaS app, so it would take some work to get it on-prem. Definitely possible though. That's a little further down the road; for the beta I'm focused more on the product and tech. All the same, thanks for the feedback!

Very nice, reminds me of the sequoia graphs for filesystems.

Is there any way to generate the graph from Cloudformation? or is it a manual thing for the moment

Hi, thanks for checking it out.

At the moment it is manual, though I have experimented with converting CF templates locally. Extracting the resources is pretty straightforward. Generating the perspectives and descriptions would still be a manual process, in most cases.

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