app.diagrams.net (formerly draw.io): a useful free tool for doing cloud and other architecture charts

by Patrick Lee on 28 Jan 2023 in categories tech with tags architecture Azure design Office

I have found app.diagrams.net useful for doing architecture charts to document and explain how the different components in a distributed application work together.

These normally include:

  • a front end (either web, mobile or desktop)
  • an authentication layer (e.g. Azure ADB2C - business to consumer)
  • WebApis (either - if called directly by the user - requiring the user to be logged in via ADB2C, or - if called by another component - they could instead be protected via an APIKey, with other useful information transmitted in the headers)
  • Azure functions (for serverless, scaleable computing)
  • Azure SQL databases (for structured storage)
  • Azure Storage accounts (for unstructured storage, e.g. blob files for images, json files, pdf reports, logs)
  • Azure Cosmos Db (for more expensive unstructured storage requiring more search facilities)
  • KeyVaults (to store secrets such as database connection strings).

Such diagrams are essential tools to help other developers understand how the system works.

It has libraries for Azure and Office that has suitable shapes to include in your diagram (see the screenshot at the top of this post for some examples).