In the realm of modern infrastructure, where cloud services and microservices reign supreme, managing and visualizing complex architectures is more critical than ever.
Gone are the days of manually creating and updating architecture diagrams. With the Diagrams Python library, you can generate dynamic, code-driven diagrams that evolve alongside your infrastructure. A few lines of Python are all it takes to visualize cloud architectures, network topologies, or microservice interactions. Diagrams ensure your system documentation stays accurate and up-to-date, whether you’re managing multi-cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters, or on-premise solutions. It’s an effortless way to keep your architecture in sync with your codebase.
In this post, we'll explore the capabilities of the Diagrams library, showcase how to create High-Level Designs (HLDs) for cloud infrastructure, and automate the process of creating architecture diagrams.
To get started with Diagrams, you’ll need to install the library and set up your environment.
Step 0: Prerequisites
To create diagrams using the Diagrams Python library on MacOS/Windows, you'll need to install Graphviz first. Graphviz is the tool that the Diagrams library uses to generate the visual representations of your infrastructure.
If you're on macOS, the easiest way to install Graphviz is using Homebrew:
brew install graphviz
If you're on Windows, follow the below steps
Step 1: Installation
brew install graphviz
Step 2: Your First Diagram
Let’s create a simple diagram that represents a basic web architecture on AWS.
pip install diagrams
With this minimal code, you can visualize how traffic flows from the Load Balancer to the Web Server, and then to the Database. That’s the power of the Diagrams library: it's quick, intuitive, and highly customizable. And this is just the beginning—there are many more advanced features and components you can leverage, which we'll explore in the following sections.
You can group components into clusters to represent different tiers or logical groupings within your architecture.
from diagrams import Diagram
from diagrams.aws.compute import EC2
from diagrams.aws.network import ELB
from diagrams.aws.database import RDS
with Diagram("Simple AWS Architecture", show=False):
lb = ELB("Load Balancer")
web = EC2("Web Server")
db = RDS("Database")
lb >> web >> db
We use Cluster() to group web servers and databases, making the diagram easier to understand by visualizing tiers separately.
Diagrams allow you to add custom labels, colors, and even custom images to represent specific components. For example, if you want to represent a custom service, you can include external images from local or even from remote.
If you have an icon saved locally (for example, a custom_icon.png file), you can use it to represent your custom component in the diagram. The code below shows how to add a custom icon from your local filesystem.
from diagrams import Cluster, Diagram
from diagrams.aws.compute import EC2
from diagrams.aws.network import ELB
from diagrams.aws.database import RDS
with Diagram("AWS Architecture with Clustering", show=False):
with Cluster("Web Tier"):
lb = ELB("Load Balancer")
web_servers = [EC2("Web 1"), EC2("Web 2")]
with Cluster("Database Tier"):
db_primary = RDS("Primary DB")
db_replica = RDS("Replica DB")
lb >> web_servers >> db_primary
db_primary >> db_replica
./custom_icon.png is the path to your local image file.
Similarly, you can use an image from a remote source. Here's how you can download an image from a URL and use it in your diagram.
You can also use custom icons from a remote URL by giving the remote path to the files.
from diagrams.custom import Custom
with Diagram("Custom Service Architecture", show=False):
custom_service = Custom("My Custom Service", "./custom_icon.png")
This allows for even more flexibility in designing architecture that suits your organization's needs.
We can also use a combination of on-premise systems and cloud infrastructure, Diagrams makes it easy to combine these elements into a single view. You can visualize hybrid architectures seamlessly.
brew install graphviz
Although Diagrams is a powerful tool, there are some challenges:
The Diagrams Python library is a fantastic tool for automating the creation of infrastructure diagrams. By integrating it into your workflows, you can generate architecture diagrams dynamically as your infrastructure changes. Whether you’re documenting your cloud infrastructure or illustrating complex microservice architectures, Diagrams offers a powerful, programmatic way to visualize your systems
You can find the complete source code for the examples in this blog on my GitHub:
This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here are only those of the author and do not represent those of any organization or any individual with whom the author may be associated, professionally or personally.
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