How do we, as a wider organisation, standardise the format, to help other engineers quickly understand what they are viewing?.How do you search for references to components across diagrams? Say if I wanted to change one of the components, how do I find diagrams relating to it to understand more about the wider context it sits in?.How do you version the diagrams, showing the differences over time as the architecture evolves?.Where do you store the diagrams in a way that makes them discoverable to others?.This format of diagram (specifically stored as a file using tools like Diagrams.Net) also then leads to other impracticalities: I've seen this and diagrams like it presented during meetings, with the expectation being that it will aid understanding, however often when they reach this level of complexity the first 10-15 minutes is an attempt by participants to understand what they are looking at. It is also only a subset of a wider system where does it sit in relation to other components in our company? What would it look like if we attempted to diagram the whole organisation's architecture like this? (a mess most likely!) It would require study, multiple questions, and long discussions on the context that the diagram leaves out. However as that engineer that has just joined the team, this diagram is daunting, scary even. To focus on the positive first in this scenario the team is prudent at keeping the diagram up to date, have laid it out in a top to bottom way that, once understood, can be navigated well & have used colour as a key to denote the state of components listed. To the Engineering Manager and existing team this is a thing of beauty, they understand it, have internalised the structure & use it for discussions on their architectural direction. Grinning with pride they bring up the following view using Diagrams.Net: Obfuscated version of a real diagram seen in the wild On your first week your Engineering Manager books a meeting to give you a high level overview of their team's architecture. Let's imagine a scenario (one I've been on both sides of the table for multiple times!): you start a new job at a large, relatively mature company one that uses things like microservices, events and loosely coupled components. I wanted to go into detail about where we were coming from and the issues we saw in that approach, along with each piece of the puzzle that formed a better approach.Ī note of thanks here to Simon Brown who has released all diagrams on his C4 Model website under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. If you have questions reach out to me here in the comments below or on twitter.ĭon’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube Channel.This is a long form article showing the journey of how we gained value in using C4 diagrams combined with Diagrams as Code when representing our team's architecture. In Lior’s video he has some awesome links to to Azure Icon sets and example PowerPoints. Massive thanks to Lior Kamrat for creating the video and I hope you find this post useful. I like the PowerPoint way of doing it as I can open up existing diagrams and easily create new diagrams off it it, I am sure you can do the same in any tool but I do particularly like how the PowerPoint diagrams turn out. This means you can use VS Code along with Draw.io to create diagrams – very cool. drawio extension then you end up with this:. If you install the draw.io integration extension by Henning Dietrichs to VS Code and then crate new empty file with the. I can reuse these super easily and use the GitHub repository David-Summers/Azure-Design: My Azure stencil collection for Visio. Here is one I created from a sample diagram from the Microsoft docs about using Private Endpoints from a Web App to a SQL Server Database. Not bad I must say, I do like it and its very easy to create cracking diagrams. Whilst tweeting about this Dave Brannan asked if I had used draw.io inside Visual Studio Code, I had dabbled with draw.io but not within VS Code, so I installed the extension and started looking into it. Lior teaches you how to use PowerPoint, yes you read that correctly, PowerPoint to create really awesome looking architectural diagrams – definitely watch all of his video if you like me don’t get on well with Visio etc.
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