victor96

Yeah that makes a lot of sense, we definitely believe there are automated ways to help speed up the modelling/diagramming process. Such as automatically populating certain levels of the model from resources in reality as you described. Possibly integrating with something like backstage.io could also be super interesting. Then you can create diagrams quicker from a pre-populated model.

Automatically generated diagrams seem to be the dream for many of the developers we chat to, however we don't see this working as great as they believe. This is due to "the model code gap" which is where the abstractions we use to discuss software architecture rarely matches 1:1 with the source code. You can read more about this on our blog article below.

https://blog.icepanel.io/2022/11/30/the-model-code-gap

We think this is more of a human/organizational problem rather than a technical one and we have tons of ideas about how to use links to reality to help humans keep docs up to date. For example an object which has had a lot of commit history recently probably needs the diagrams or docs updating.

What use cases do you have if the diagrams were exported to code?

What use cases do you have that need the model to be committed to the repository if it wasn't bi-directional?

Sorry I don't understand, what specifically do you mean?

Please give it another go, I've replied to your support email.

Hey Gordon,

It'd be great to hear your thoughts/feedback on the tool. Please feel free to reach out to us.

In terms your comment about lock-in I understand your fear and I think a lot of companies will share this. We currently offer PDF/PNG export however due to the interactive nature of our diagrams we're looking into how we can provide an interactive export. An IcePanel file is also an idea we're looking into. We'd love to work with you if you have any specific ideas in this area.

We're only using cloud functions for the initial redirect for some links, looks like we're hitting some kind of quota limit in our cloud environment. Should be fixed now.

Here's one of these I found recently: https://dbdiagram.io/

We're currently working on tooling at http://icepanel.io which supports the C4 model. Please reach out to us if you'd like to chat about this, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

I also love the simplicity and structure of the C4 model. I'm currently working on a tool at http://icepanel.io which implements the concepts that are talked about.

We've been listening to the great feedback given by our community and early adopters and are excited to announce the launch of our beta macOS and Windows desktop app!

Visualize, create and edit resources on your Kubernetes clusters in real-time.

https://icepanel.io/l/OhwjieuuK

Visualize runtime Kubernetes objects generated by your Helm chart in our latest IcePanel 0.4 release. We'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions in our Discord community channels.

Struggling to understand your complex microservice architecture from a bunch of huge YAML files? Quickly visualize and develop new or existing projects using the IcePanel editor. Check out our website and download the free VSCode plugin to give it a try.

https://icepanel.io/l/CSTs3TQd3

Thoughts, feedback and suggestions are welcome!