Diagrams are an important part of communicating the game plan with your dev team. One of the most basic diagrams I use is a Network Map Diagram. Its purpose is exactly like what it sounds: It serves as a map of all the various functioning services that work together to serve your users needs. It also helps illustrate which services have direct communication with each other.

For example it is unlikely your Load Balancer would talk directly to your Database. It is far more likely that traffic from your Load Balancer gets directed to your application layer first and that in turn sends traffic to your Database.

Additionally you can group services by various similarities for example you can indicate that a group of resources are in a specific subnet or availability zone by drawing a box around them.

I like to spice my diagrams up with some fancy icons, even some in my pixel art style if possible.

Network Map Diagrams work great in a cloud environment but originated back in the day of physical networking and still are used for that as well.

Having a Network Map will help you when creating other types of diagrams like a Swim Lane Flowchart but I will save the details of that diagram for another short post.

If you are interested in stepping up your diagramming game you should check out my Diagramming Tool that I should be releasing an alpha of soon.

~Cheers

PS: If you are interested in engaging my services as a Web Application Architect check out my Group Coaching Program or 1 on 1 Consulting at schematical.com and check out my FREE eBook 20 Things You Can DoTo Save Money On Your Amazon Web Services Bill Today