Component library
Everything in the Components panel of the editor. Drag or click to place it on the canvas. Smart components are parametric: change a property such as the replica count and the diagram regenerates in place, keeping your own edits.
Smart components
Load-balanced service
A load balancer in front of N identical replicas, optionally with health checks.
Database with replicas
A primary database with read replicas, optionally spread over two availability zones.
Queue with consumers
Producers, a broker with partitions, consumer groups and an optional dead-letter queue.
Cache-aside
The application checks the cache first and loads from the database on a miss.
API gateway fan-out
Clients reach N backend services through a gateway with optional auth and rate limiting.
Kubernetes deployment
Ingress, a Service and a Deployment of N pods, with optional autoscaling.
CQRS pattern
Commands write through a write model; events feed read-optimised projections for queries.
Saga orchestrator
An orchestrator drives a sequence of local transactions and compensates on failure.
Event sourcing
State is the fold of an append-only event log, with projections and optional snapshots.
Circuit breaker
Closed → open → half-open state machine protecting a downstream call.
Three-tier web app
Presentation, application and data tiers with optional CDN and cache.
Multi-region active/passive
A primary region serving traffic with warm standby regions and a failover mechanism.
CDN with origin shield
Edge locations fall back to a single shield layer that protects the origin.
ETL pipeline
Sources feed ingestion, transformation stages and a warehouse or lake, optionally orchestrated.
Pub/sub fan-out
One publisher, a topic, and N independent subscribers (with an optional dead-letter queue).
Worker pool
A queue drained by N workers, with optional autoscaling.
Service mesh
Services with sidecar proxies talking over mTLS, managed by a control plane.
Building blocks
Clients
- Client: Any end-user device or caller.
- Browser: Web browser running a single-page or server-rendered app.
- Mobile app: Native or cross-platform mobile application.
Edge & network
- API gateway: Single entry point handling routing, auth and throttling.
- Load balancer: Spreads traffic across healthy instances (L4 or L7).
- CDN: Edge caches that serve static and cacheable content close to users.
- Reverse proxy: Terminates TLS and forwards requests to backends.
- DNS: Resolves names to addresses; often used for failover and geo routing.
- Firewall: Network-level allow/deny rules between zones.
- WAF: Web application firewall filtering malicious HTTP traffic.
- Rate limiter: Caps request rates per client to protect backends.
Compute
- Service: A deployable application service.
- Microservice: Small, independently deployable service owning one capability.
- Worker: Background processor consuming jobs from a queue.
- Cron job: Scheduled task running at fixed times or intervals.
- Serverless function: Event-driven function billed per invocation.
- Container: Packaged process with its dependencies.
- Pod: Smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes (one or more containers).
- Node / VM: Virtual or physical machine hosting workloads.
Data
- Cache (Redis): In-memory key-value cache or data structure store.
- Cache (Memcached): Simple distributed in-memory cache.
- SQL database: Relational database with transactions and joins.
- NoSQL database: Document, key-value or wide-column store scaling horizontally.
- Object storage: Durable blob storage for files and media.
- Search index: Full-text and faceted search engine.
- Data warehouse: Columnar store optimised for analytics queries.
Messaging
- Message queue: Point-to-point buffer decoupling producers from consumers.
- Topic / stream: Partitioned, replayable log of events.
- Pub/Sub: Fan-out of messages to many subscribers.
- Event bus: Routes events between services by rules.
- Scheduler: Triggers work at a future time or on a schedule.
Security
- Auth provider: Identity provider handling login, SSO and tokens.
- Secrets vault: Stores and rotates credentials and keys.
Operations
- Observability stack: Metrics, logs and traces with dashboards and alerts.
- CI/CD pipeline: Builds, tests and deploys changes automatically.
- Feature flag service: Turns features on or off per user or environment at runtime.
External
- Third-party API: External service you integrate with but do not run.
Boundaries
- VPC / network: Isolated virtual network boundary.
- Subnet: Address range inside a network, public or private.
- Cluster: Group of nodes managed together (e.g. Kubernetes).
- Region / zone: Geographic region or availability zone.
Technology logos
Logos are trademarks of their owners; sources and licences are on the credits page.
AWS: AWS, Lambda, S3, EC2, DynamoDB, RDS, API Gateway, CloudFront, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Route 53, ELB, VPC, CloudWatch, EKS, ECS, Kinesis, IAM, Secrets Manager, ElastiCache, Cognito, Fargate.
Google Cloud: Google Cloud, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run.
Azure: Azure, Azure (icon).
Platform: Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Helm, Ansible, Envoy, Consul, Vault.
Datastores: Redis, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Memcached, InfluxDB, Neo4j, SQLite, MariaDB, Snowflake.
Messaging & data: Kafka, RabbitMQ, Spark, Flink, GraphQL, gRPC, Swagger / OpenAPI.
Edge & identity: NGINX, Kong, Cloudflare, Auth0, Okta.
Observability: Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Sentry, Kibana, Logstash.
CI/CD: GitHub Actions, GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, CircleCI.
Languages: Node.js, React, Go, Python.
Services: Stripe, Twilio.