
Show HN: CloudSkew – Draw AWS, Azure, GCP, K8s architecture diagrams - mithunshanbhag
https://www.cloudskew.com/
======
mithunshanbhag
Hello everyone, I'm Mithun, creator of cloudskew.com: a free app for sketching
cloud architecture diagrams.

Check out some diagram samples here -
[https://www.cloudskew.com/docs/samples.html](https://www.cloudskew.com/docs/samples.html)

Icons for AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, CNCF, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud and
more are already preloaded in the app.

Documentation for all AWS, Azure, GCP resources can be accessed from within
the app itself.

Hope the community finds it useful.

PS: Follow me on twitter for regular updates on this app:
[https://twitter.com/mithunshanbhag](https://twitter.com/mithunshanbhag)

~~~
moritonal
Hihi, hope its okay to ask, but why is it free? It's a great tool, but you
have an associated Professional Services and your privacy policy is currently
empty [1]. Will we get contacted about contracting opportunities if we sign-
up?

1\. [https://www.cloudskew.com/about/privacy-
policy.html](https://www.cloudskew.com/about/privacy-policy.html))

~~~
mithunshanbhag
LOL. Good questions.

1\. Haven't found the time to fill in the privacy-policy, terms-of-usage
pages. Been swamped with feature work.

2\. No, you'll never get ANY emails from us.

3\. Product is free for individual users. However, there are plans to release
a paid enterprise version later in the year (with SSO, customer-managed-
encryption-keys, customer-managed-storage, team collaboration features etc).

------
MaxBarraclough
No way to try it without signing in/signing up?

~~~
mithunshanbhag
At present, no. Details:
[https://github.com/cloudskew/cloudskew/issues/38](https://github.com/cloudskew/cloudskew/issues/38)

------
farski
The initial experience to get AWS icons loaded was a little strange. I saw all
the Azure icons loaded by default, and when I searched for something like "S3"
I got a message that said "No records found. Did you try adjusting your icon
preferences from the 'user preferences and settings' menu?", but I couldn't
find that menu.

I eventually saw the "Add/remove icons" option at the bottom of the screen,
and figured out how to turn on the AWS icons, but then I got stuck in that
menu. I had to refresh the page to get out of it.

~~~
mithunshanbhag
Thanks for reporting. Did you notice any browser console errors? If so, would
you mind filing an issue here:
[https://github.com/cloudskew/cloudskew/issues](https://github.com/cloudskew/cloudskew/issues)

------
sequence7
This is super nice, congratulations on building and releasing it. It's great
that you've got so many decent icons but I find having to go into my profile
to choose icon sets a bit unintuitive, I only found that option by blind luck.
Also please implement a collapse all for the icon groups.

~~~
mithunshanbhag
Feedback noted!

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jpetrucc
Looks pretty interesting!

I've been using Cloudcraft [0] for a while now for AWS diagrams, and I'm quite
happy with it - it even can do some cost estimation stuff based on resources
you have in your diagrams!

[0]: [https://cloudcraft.co/](https://cloudcraft.co/)

------
alexh1
Cool! Did you know about [https://arcentry.com/](https://arcentry.com/) when
you started this? Sorry on mobile so I won't look at your commit history to
see if you started before.

I know the guy behind arcentry so just curious.

~~~
mithunshanbhag
Unfortunately, from what I've heard, that product is being discontinued for
business reasons: [https://arcentry.com/discontinuation-
letter/](https://arcentry.com/discontinuation-letter/)

Which is a shame because the product screenshots look pretty impressive! I'm
not too sure what the ultimate experience with 3D/isometric drawings is like,
but the diagrams sure look cool!

------
hypewatch
Have you looked at Lucidchart -
[https://www.lucidchart.com/](https://www.lucidchart.com/)? They also have
cloud infra icons.

~~~
mithunshanbhag
Yes, true. However, here's a bit more context on the need for CloudSkew:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23613510](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23613510)

------
aurbano
Looks great! What libraries have you guys used in the frontend, if you don't
mind sharing?

I worked on an internal tool at a company with a slightly similar UI so I'm
curious about it

~~~
jahewson
I wondered this too - it’s Syncfusion Diagrams with Angular.

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unethical_ban
This looks pretty neat! A visio for the cloud.

I thought it might autogenerate visuals based on Terraform or Cloudformation
specs. That would be neat!

Anyway, I'm keeping an eye on this. Thanks.

~~~
mithunshanbhag
Thanks. Good point.

Some time back, I've received a similar feature request for deployment scripts
to diagram conversion (and vice versa).

However:

\- A very, very small fraction of CloudSkew users have actually requested this
feature (i.e. not a whole lot of user demand).

\- This is a "high-effort-required" yet "hard-to-get-right" feature (extremely
error prone).

So currently, there are no plans to work on this feature.

That said, if enough users demand it AND there is a compelling business case
for this, I can definitely add this to the product roadmap.

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satyrnein
Are there tools that can build a diagram automatically by looking at your AWS
account (or some sort of export) for the truly lazy? Asking for a friend...

~~~
marketgod
Lookup LucidCharts. I haven't tested it myself.

Edit: They have another service for this.

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etxm
Export/import/sync PlantUML would be awesome.

Does anyone know a visual diagramming tool with diagrams as code support?

I’ve seen some with basic PlantUML importing.

~~~
mithunshanbhag
Try mingrammer (not entirely sure if that supports plantUML conversion
though).

------
dano
This is quite impressive and I like the transparency provided on the about
page regarding your architecture, toolchain, and workflow.

~~~
mithunshanbhag
Thank you! I'll be writing more about the app as it evolves in the coming
days.

Link for others: [https://www.cloudskew.com/about/cloudskew-
architecture.html](https://www.cloudskew.com/about/cloudskew-
architecture.html)

------
ciguy
Looks really nice, similar to draw.io but a bit cleaner designs. I would
recommend making the default sign up flow friendlier to AWS and GCP users.
Right now figuring out how to add those libraries is hard.

Also I would highly recommend more top level groups (AWS, Azure etc...)
instead of having each type of service for each cloud on a new side tab.
Basically make it more hierarchical.

Finally, make everything collapsed by default. Having dozens of tabs expanded
on start is annoying to say the least.

~~~
mithunshanbhag
Good points. Will add this to my backlog.

PS: The search box (on top of the icon palette) should make things a bit
easier. For some icons, it can even search with synonyms (e.g. search for
'nosql' will show 'mongodb'). However this is not consistent across all cloud
provider icons currently.

------
ralphael
Looks nice, what does it do that something like draw.io doesn't?

~~~
mithunshanbhag
Good question.

While there are many tools for sketching flowcharts, mind-maps, UML diagrams
etc, cloudskew has cloud architecture diagrams as its sole focus.

Also planning your cloud architecture requires several round-trips between
your drawing tool, document editor (for architecture documentation), looking
up reference architectures, googling for AWS documentation (for resource docs,
pricing details etc).

CloudSkew can reduce some of these pains today:

1\. It already has a built-in document editor (so architecture documentation +
diagrams can reside side-by-side).

2\. Links to official docs (including pricing details, SLA) for all AWS, Azure
and GCP resources are available within the app itself.

3\. Bigger icon set (as far as cloud diagrams are concerned).

Later in the year, some cloudskew features will be coming to make cloud
architecture planning easier.

~~~
chessmango
These are all pretty killer. For non-generalist stuff this is great - I work
for AWS myself and arch diagrams are generally draw.io for me, and considering
this is a web service I'd be unlikely to use it but in another life,
absolutely.

I feel like non-generalist tools like this are useful for exactly what they're
good at, especially along with doc links etc.

Any plans to do this cool things like Cloudcraft with describes to pre-
populate diagrams? I'd imagine this would be quite an undertaking for a cloud-
agnostic service.

Kudos!

~~~
mithunshanbhag
Thanks.

1\. Does your team/org maintain a central diagram repository? Or do team
members use their diagram tool of choice and then export diagram into a
central doc library (e.g. github markdown)?

2\. The short-term plan is to add more diagram templates (e.g. VPCs, K8s
clusters) to help folks author complex architectures quickly.

3\. There are plans to release a paid enterprise version later in the year
with features like SSO, customer-managed-encryption-keys, customer-managed-
storage, team collaboration etc.

Overall, CloudSkew will remain focused on cloud diagram only.

~~~
chessmango
1\. Yes/no - my own team is more the latter as I'm more customer-facing and
lone-ranger-y, but other teams do a lot more collab and keep things central.
As far as I'm aware though, it's a bit of a mixed bag, so getting to the point
where we're all on the same page would be fantastic.

2\. This sounds great. I like the k8s angle particularly as well - I have yet
to find much useful in that area, so having a service that's good at it would
be wonderful.

3\. This I'd imagine would be end-game at AWS. Specifically ability to handle
own storage and keys would be an immediate sell here. We've just taken on
Slack Enterprise Grid for basically this (granted this was a 2-way deal:
[https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280829/slack-amazon-
aws-...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280829/slack-amazon-aws-
partnership-amazon-chime-voice-video-calls)) so clearly we're up for it :D

I get the focus though. Seems like a good opportunity to set yourself up as
best-in-class for this type of thing. I'll certainly be using CloudSkew for
anything I need privately. :)

~~~
mithunshanbhag
Thank you for the pointers! This is great info.

Also, please feel free to file feature requests or bugs/issues over on github:
[https://github.com/cloudskew/cloudskew/issues](https://github.com/cloudskew/cloudskew/issues)

------
mindhash
Been using cloudskew for sometime. Happy with it. Great support.

~~~
mithunshanbhag
Thank you!

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xwdv
Export to ASCII would be awesome

~~~
mithunshanbhag
Cool, yes.

Adds business value, no :-)

~~~
xwdv
The value is in the marketing, capturing the developer crowds attention

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ckdarby
What was wrong with draw.io?

~~~
mithunshanbhag
Nothing wrong with it. Answered here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23613510](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23613510)

------
moltar
Looks great.

Feature req: snapping to grid

~~~
mithunshanbhag
Aha, good observation. I actually disabled snap-to-grid a couple of weeks ago
(was making the mouse drag sluggish for some reason). Probably a bug on my
end, need to investigate further and fix.

