This looks amazing. I find Mermaid.js ugly and the syntax difficult/buggy but unfortunately it's one of the best supported diagram tools in static site generators. It'd be awesome to have Isoflow diagrams embedded in Markdown like that.
I always loved the isometric diagrams on Clive Maxfield's [1] books about electronics. Since a lot of circuits are non-planar (flip flops, semiconductor layers, FPGA architecture), adding a perspective view makes things uncluttered, and easier to understand and remember. I think it translates well to many technologies.
No you're absolutely right, isoflow is doing 90% of the work here, I'm not hiding that, they just don't have a ready to use version like this of their community pack. That's all this is.
Reminds me of a similar project years ago that was doing the same thing - they ultimately struggled with monetization and folded (I forget the name) -- however this one is MIT OSS, so I'm guessing that's not a key concern right now.
Thanks! I can't take any credit at all for the icons/design that's all Isoflow, but their community edition is designed to steer you to the pro version.
No plans at all for money making, just want people to enjoy using it.
Thank you for pointing out the link, I'll get on that ;)
I've not done anything special here, just wrapped the community edition of ISOFLOW https://github.com/markmanx/isoflow
and made it dead easy to set up and run.
You can now export and load JSON backups of your diagrams allowing you to essentially have as many as you want, which the community version of ISOFLOW restricts. Enjoy!
I'm not very familiar with Node.js. Any idea where in isoflow's code are the graphics for those 3D-style icons? Are they SVG or what? Is it possible to add custom icons?
It's a bit confusing to see "openflow" diagrams that include network components, that have nothing to do with OpenFlow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFlow
It is unrelated, right? Just a name clash with an overlapping domain?
Hahahah yes so funnily enough my dad works with the IETF, and I showed him this project and he said "I was really confused why you called it that when that's a standard"
Might be due a rebrand already!
Interesting visuals change the way in which people engage with a diagram. You can think of it as an aspect of storytelling. Personally I find my eyes much more likely to be drawn to these isometric diagrams, compared to a 2D equivalence. The 3D aspect draws my eyes in and keeps them there. So what's being added doesn't need to be raw information that changes the facts of a diagram, it can be an aid to processing. There's a reason that visual design is a thing.
This is a little tangential, but I've wondered for a while if there's a better way to visualise the composition of software systems.
Often, there's not only a single way to look at one: There's a user interaction flow through components, but those components also consist of hardware; the hardware might be virtual and composed of several, spread, sub-components, or even containers. You can go down this path pretty deep, and arrive at several different representations of the system that are either impossible to visualise at the same time, or make it incomprehensible.
Ideally, I would want to have a way to document different facets of the system individually, but linked to each other, and be able to change my perspective at anytime. This would allow to flip between UX, network traffic, firewall boundaries, program flow, logical RPC flow, and so on; all while being able to view connected components for a given component at anytime. For example, inspecting an application, then viewing its network ports, then its runtime container, the hypervisor the container runs on, the cloud provider that sits in, and so on.
My idea so far is a graph database that contains all components and the edges between them. The tool would have to be as extensible as possible, so using something like HCL to describe the graph would be great, with extensions for all kinds of components and edges. And finally a viewer to render visual representations of one or more composable layers to flick through, and export etc.
I never got around to working on it yet, but if anyone else had the same idea, I'd be open to collaborating :)
Terrastruct looks really nice, and kind of like a 2D version of the 3D thing I'm thinking of; if you could attach key-value properties to nodes and vertices, and had different rendering modes that made use of any of these properties to render the item differently, that would probably be pretty close. For example, a layer that displays a physical network might only consider vertices with a `kind` attribute of "physical link"; that limits the layer to all nodes with a matching vertex between them, and the layer would also only display those attributes of the nodes relevant for the current view.
Whoa as an infrastructure guy I had always dreamed of diagrams like this. And while I've used Miro and some OSS homebrew stuff, nothing was as polished as this. Well done.
There are quite a few tools that offer this model-based approach; you define your resources in a model, then use them in multiple perspectives to show different aspects like you describe. Some, like Ilograph[0] (my project), offer interactivity and zooming.
Some very good points, I totally agree, I suppose as you said you get to a point in your abstraction where it either loses meaning or becomes too complex to view. I think it would be a fantastic thing to try! Go build it!
what if we can make these diagrams synchronized with reality. you need the diagram to pull from the same source of truth as your actual infrastructure - whether that's terraform state, kubernetes manifests, or service discovery. that way diagrams become less historical artifacts and more of living documentation
I absolutely love cloudcraft, full disclosure one of our team at work wanted to use it, but we're a public sector org(no money), so I threw this together for him
That's a great thought, I'd need to make some kind of translation between manifests and the json, getting knowledge of those relationships might be tricky?
Service discovery is another route, would hate to get someones IT department angry for aggressive port scanning though lol
"beautiful" here is definitely subjective. I only see a diagram and it looks like from PowerPoint presentation from the marketing team to the sales team.
Why JS world frequently uses "beautiful" or "modern" to describe its project? Often that hides something else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFlow
https://github.com/mmastrac/stylus
It works by automatically changing CSS classes, and it looks like the underlying isoflow library should support this.
[1] https://www.clivemaxfield.com
Reminds me of a similar project years ago that was doing the same thing - they ultimately struggled with monetization and folded (I forget the name) -- however this one is MIT OSS, so I'm guessing that's not a key concern right now.
Note that your "Built with the Isoflow library" link at the bottom to isoflow 404's to https://github.com/isoflow/isoflow
No plans at all for money making, just want people to enjoy using it.
Thank you for pointing out the link, I'll get on that ;)
this way i could tell the LLM that will be generating my JSON to include the following links as X and create the output JSON immediately
It is unrelated, right? Just a name clash with an overlapping domain?
^ ISOFLOW have an online demo you can use :)
Often, there's not only a single way to look at one: There's a user interaction flow through components, but those components also consist of hardware; the hardware might be virtual and composed of several, spread, sub-components, or even containers. You can go down this path pretty deep, and arrive at several different representations of the system that are either impossible to visualise at the same time, or make it incomprehensible.
Ideally, I would want to have a way to document different facets of the system individually, but linked to each other, and be able to change my perspective at anytime. This would allow to flip between UX, network traffic, firewall boundaries, program flow, logical RPC flow, and so on; all while being able to view connected components for a given component at anytime. For example, inspecting an application, then viewing its network ports, then its runtime container, the hypervisor the container runs on, the cloud provider that sits in, and so on.
My idea so far is a graph database that contains all components and the edges between them. The tool would have to be as extensible as possible, so using something like HCL to describe the graph would be great, with extensions for all kinds of components and edges. And finally a viewer to render visual representations of one or more composable layers to flick through, and export etc.
I never got around to working on it yet, but if anyone else had the same idea, I'd be open to collaborating :)
defining diagrams as multiple layers like so
A fleshed out example hosted on our web service: https://app.terrastruct.com/diagrams/664641071Does that make sense?
[0] https://www.ilograph.com
[1]: https://www.cloudcraft.co/
[2]: I’m part of the Cloudcraft team at DataDog, so obviously, I’m biased.
Why JS world frequently uses "beautiful" or "modern" to describe its project? Often that hides something else.