arch-gen

Arch gen

A cli tool to generate AWS architecture diagrams from yml files.

I made this at a hackathon so it's clearly missing some features:

• Cycles. The connections can only go one way
• Arrows. There are no arrows on the drawn lines
• Efficient placement of the nodes on the grid

Usage

Running the tool

./arch-gen

There are different flags that can be passed to the tool

• -i the name of the input file. Defaults to arch-gen.yml
• -o the name of the output file. Defaults to arch-gen.png
• -height the height in pixels of the png image in the output. Defaults to 1024.
• -width the width in pixels of the png image in the output. Defaults to 1024.

Can be used like so:

./arch-gen -i input-file.yml -o output-image.png --width 500 --height 250

Yaml syntax

There are four valid yaml keys

• type: the type of the resource. These must match the name of the files in images/.
• title: the title of the resource
• children: any children the resource may have. The children will be connected to the current resource.
• scale: This will scale the line between the current resource and its parent

Example

type: Amazon-API-Gateway
title: v1/api/resource
children:
  - type: AWS-Lambda
    title: api handler
    children:
      - type: Amazon-DynamoDB
        title: Resource
        children:
          - type: Amazon-EventBridge
            title: Updates EventBridge Pipe
            children:
              - type: Amazon-Simple-Email-Service
                title: Update Emailer
          - type: AWS-Lambda
            title: Delete stream
            children:
              - type: Amazon-Simple-Notification-Service
                title: Delete Topic
                children:
                  - type: AWS-Lambda
                    title: Deleter
                    children:
                      - type: Amazon-Simple-Storage-Service
                        title: Resource storage

  - type: AWS-Lambda
    title: Metrics Lambda
    scale: 2.0 # This will double the vertical distance between this resource and the parent
    children:
      - type: Amazon-Simple-Queue-Service
        title: Metrics
        children:
          - type: AWS-Lambda
            title: Metrics service
            children:
              - type: Amazon-DynamoDB
                title: Metrics table
              - type: Amazon-Simple-Notification-Service
                title: Metrics Topic

This will result in the following image being generated:

Credits

Icons are sourced from https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/ and are fully owned by Amazon Web Services. Inc.. Terms of use at https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/.