Show HN: Clouddraw – draw cloud architecture diagrams with ease

I checked it out and created a diagram, then I clicked the icon in the upper left corner thinking it was some sort of menu. But it just took me to the main home page -- but without saving anything at all or even prompting me. So I basically lost all the work I did without warning. Is that supposed to happen?

> Create as many diagrams as you want. Save your diagrams locally to pause and continue later.

I found the save button, but it seems to just take a single snapshot and reload that automatically if I leave and return. So it seems like you can only have one diagram going at a time? But even if I want to start a new diagram, I can't figure out how to do that without manually clicking each individual icon and deleting them, one-by-one.

Maybe I need to signup for this additional functionality to work?

Clouddraw allows you to create beautiful cloud architecture diagrams with ease.

I downloaded and organized more than 1000 official images from AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Firebase and others like Digitalocean, Slack etc and built this tool. I use this to generate quick architecture diagrams for my personal projects.

Here are some of the features

Offline support - Save your diagram offline in browser local storage to continue later.

PNG - Export your diagrams to png to embed anywhere.

Keyboard shortcuts

Font Awesome support

Embed anywhere - You can embed your diagram anywhere and show up-to-date diagrams in your documentation (coming soon).

There is no signup required. You can start creating your diagrams right away.

This looks like a cool project and I like to support developers that share their projects here and on Twitter.

Looks great, felt pretty snappy to use. Replace the demo on the home page with a good screen shot of a diagram. It’s a bunch of random interactions so it just looks like a mess of icons and arrows.

That said, software diagramming is broken.

Pretty icons are great and all, but without common annotations and consistency; what’s the point?

I’ve seen so many diagrams, with bidirectional arrows between an EC2 instance and an RDS instance.

ec2 <—-> rds

Great. The EC2 goes in and out of the RDS instance?

Using common annotations like making the arrow from the requestor and having some details of the request goes a long way.

ec2 —[r/w public]—> rds

Maybe even use the schema and roleARN to give some useful request auth context.

Using solid arrows for sync and dashed for async.

If both sides of an arrow make requests... don’t use two sided arrows, draw an arrow for each and annotate appropriately.

And LucidCharts, Visio, etc? Instant docrot.

I’d love to see more diagrams as code, along side the code they represent so diagram changes and code changes can happen in the same PR. PlantUML, mermaid, and mingrammers’s diagrams are great options here.

I really like Simon Brown’s C4 modeling [1]. It really helps teach you to diagram systems by focusing on what the system does, not how pretty the diagram is.

C4 Builder is also great. [2]

[1]: https://c4model.com/

[2]: https://github.com/adrianvlupu/C4-Builder

I like the idea. I have tried a bunch but haven't found "the one" cloud architecture diagram that I truly love yet.

I would be more into it if the diagram could be exported / represented as code so I could keep an updateable source in my git repo.

I also think things like VPCs should be able to be represented as containers of other components vs just another icon.

The feature I want in all of these is images for every CloudFormation elements. I know that only a handful of them have their own icons and it makes it hard to draw the full extent of an architecture. Draw.io was a pain for this.

Is there a difference between this and https://www.cloudskew.com/ previously featured here?

I've been using tools like this since visio and they're always helpful but never quite right. One of my dreams if I won a small lottery would be to make something like this but for VR. I think the spatial/3rd-dimesion factor would unlock a lot of possibility for visualizing these complex systems without being forced to collapse or slice it as much.

I am sorry, I don't get the value add here. Can I not use power point, keynote or other applications and create a box and label it "slack" or "AWS"? Why should I use this?

i found https://excalidraw.com/ from HN awhile go and love it. This looks similar.

Anyone have recommendations for making networking diagrams, specifically AWS VPC diagrams that show things like private/public subnets, security groups, load balancers, autoscaling groups, etc.

I tried a bunch of tools a few months ago, and none of the purpose-built diagraming tools worked well in creating that sort of visualization.

A lot of negativity here, so here's some positive feedback:

The UI is very clean and easy to use. I like the minimalism and the restrained scope of the project. A lot of diagram creators try to do too much and end up being confusing and hard to pick up.

Looks like a great little tool!

I was playing around a bit and it really looks promising! There's some key missing features (like, selecting multiple items) and bugs (ctrl + v not working for me at least), but as an MVP is remarkable. Thanks for sharing.

You can add 'Show HN' to the title for more visibility on the https://news.ycombinator.com/show page

Very nice. Quick feedback on UI (on an Android phone): the hamburger menu didn't work, the text has some alignment issues, the padding for the I'm interested button is gone.

Best of luck.

As an FYI, your Terms and Conditions page mentions the non-existing domain clouddraw.live

draw.io does a decent job. Does clouddraw bring edge in anything specific?

Any thoughts on this versus draw.io? Like new or missing features, etc?

No love for OpenShift?

It's nice though.

Confirmed not working on Firefox.

It's 2020, just for the record.