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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Ilograph 2.1.0 is a major new release for all Ilograph environments (web, desktop, and Confluence Cloud) that adds sub-sequences to sequence perspectives. Sub-sequences are steps-within-steps in sequence diagrams. When rendered, they appear as colored boxes that viewers can zoom in to: A sequence perspective with four …

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Ilograph 2.0.1 is a major new release for all Ilograph environments (web, desktop, and Confluence Cloud) that adds the following enhancements: Embedded perspectives Perspectives can now be directly embedded in other perspectives. When embedded, perspectives appear as boxes showing the perspective in minature, and users …

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Ilograph 1.9.8 is a major new release for all Ilograph environments (web, desktop, and Confluence Cloud) that adds the following enhancements and bug fixes: Via relations The new via property on relations allows diagram authors to create relations that go through other resources:

Via relations are handy for preserving …

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Ilograph 1.9.4 (all environments) adds a new feature called scale overrides. Scale overrides allows diagram editors to adjust the size of resources on a per-perspective basis: Resource scale being adjusted The new scale property in the perspective overrides section adjusts the scale of resource(s) relative to their …

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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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Ilograph 1.8.1 is now available in all environments (web, desktop, and Confluence Cloud). It includes the following enhancements: Markdown support in arrow descriptions When diagramming, the arrows between resources are just as important as the resources themselves. This is why we’ve added enhanced support for …

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