System architecture diagrams are essential tools for documenting complex systems. However, common mistakes in these diagrams can lead to confusion, misinterpretation, and frustration for viewers. Here’s a rundown of seven (more!) common mistakes to avoid. This is a follow-up to the original 7 Common Mistakes in …

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A fan trap in data modeling occurs when multiple 1:N relations are joined on the “1” side, resulting in information loss. To the uninitiated, this is easiest understood by example: imagine a university with many colleges, each with many departments, which in turn have many professors. If modeled incorrectly, where the …

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a vast library of solutions to everyday business problems. In this series, we critique the architecture diagrams included in these solutions and attempt to expand and improve on them. Read the previous entries here and here. Below is the architecture diagram for AWS’s Intelligent …

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Below is a “master” architecture diagram of Ilograph’s back end deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is a relatively simple serverless back end that handles CRUD operations for the Ilograph web app but also serves Ilograph Desktop and the Export API. Here it is: Ilograph’s serverless back-end …

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By now, generative artificial intelligence’s ability to create text and images is well known. Generating system architecture diagrams would seem to be a natural extension of this. In this article, we examine three use cases for AI-generated system architecture diagrams. We will evaluate AI’s ability to create generic …

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Welcome. This article shows how to generate architecture diagrams from resources in an AWS account (or multiple accounts). The techniques used here make use of only free tools and don’t require giving access to your AWS account(s). The diagrams will be interactive and show the resources from multiple perspectives: …

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In this article, we’ll look at the importance of contexts in system architecture diagrams and recent enhancements to how they are handled in Ilograph. Defining diagram “contexts” System architecture diagrams visually document complex technical systems. Most come in the form of either relational or sequence …

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a vast library of solutions to everyday business problems. In this series, we critique the architecture diagrams included in these solutions and attempt to expand and improve on them. Read the previous entry here. This article has been updated. Below is AWS’s architecture diagram for …

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a vast library of solutions to everyday business problems. In this series, we critique the architecture diagrams included in these solutions and attempt to expand and improve on them. This article has been updated to include new perspectives. Below is AWS’s architecture diagram for …

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Ilograph is excited to announce the launch of the Ilograph Architecture Center. The Ilograph Architecture Center is the central location to find highly-detailed system architecture diagrams built with Ilograph. It is an excellent recource for those looking to learn about system design and architecture by example. …

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