AWS Diagram

Types of AWS Diagrams

There are primarily two types of AWS diagrams most users want to create.

AWS Architecture diagrams used to plan and review how your AWS resources and services are organized for easier audits and design changes.

AWS CloudFormation diagrams used to mockup and experiment what will be deployed by CloudFormation.

You can create an AWS diagram manually by dragging-and-dropping symbols into groups and containers or you can have a tool like SmartDraw generate a diagram of your existing set up automatically by connecting it to your AWS account.

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Arrows

Arrows and lines show workflow and connections between resources.

AWS Service Icons

Service icons represent an AWS service like EC2, S3, IAM, and more.

AWS Resource Icons

Resource icons are used to represent a resource needed to perform an AWS service. For example, an EC2 service can have Auto Scaling, Elastic IP Address, and Instance resources.

General Resource Icons

Apply to generic categories and services like the Internet, Email, Multimedia, Users, and more.

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Type of AWS Groups and Containers

AWS Cloud

Most AWS Architecture Diagrams will be contained in a single AWS Cloud group denoted by a black outline and icon.

Inside this group, you might build other groupings as needed like Availability Zones, VPCs, and more.

VPCs

VPC stands for Virtual Private Cloud. AWS provides a VPC service for launching resources in a virtual network that you define. The grouping denotes the logical isolation of the network of resources.

Private and Public Subnets

VPCs can have private and public subnets. For example, for a web application, there's a part of the application that will run on a publicly accessible, customer-facing Public Subnet, while the back-end like the database will be on a Private Subnet.

Regions and Availability Zones

AWS has Regions defined by clusters of data centers in specific geographic areas. Each AWS Region consists of multiple, isolated, and physically separate Availability Zones within that geographic area.

EC2 Group

EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud. This service from Amazon lets you deploy applications on virtual servers without a significant upfront hardware investment.You can scale your hardware and networking requirements as needed. An EC2 instance will have a combination of CPU, memory, storage that you configure.

Auto Scaling Group

An Auto Scaling group is a logical grouping of EC2 instances for easier management and health checks.

Spot Fleet

You can save on your AWS costs by using Spot Instances instead of full EC2 instances. Spot Instances are unused EC2 instances offered for a lower price. A Spot Fleet is a collection of Spot Instances.

Elastic Beanstalk

Elastic Beanstalk is an AWS service to handle application deployment, load balancing, health monitoring, and more automatically.

Step Functions Workflow

AWS Step Functions combine Lambda functions that let you run code without servers and other AWS services to build applications. An application is basically a series of steps in a workflow or state machine. A step is a state of that workflow that represents a unit of work from an AWS service. You can combine steps with little code to build robust applications.

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Type of AWS Groups and Containers

To generate an AWS diagram automatically, you can click on the Import AWS button in the SmartPanel to the left of your drawing area in an AWS template.

This will let you import your AWS data by connecting to your AWS account.

Name your diagram and select the region you want to visualize.

To authenticate with AWS, enter your AWS Secret Token and Key Token.

Once your diagram is generated, you can click on the blue "i" icon on each shape to view its metdata. This will contain information about each resource, like instance type, operation status, stack name and a whole lot more.

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