Creating Azure Architecture Diagrams from scratch (almost)

Part of my job is creating Azure Architectural diagrams and to be honest I really didn’t get on that well with Visio, its a great product but there was a lot of swearing when fiddling around with spacing and drawing arrows the way I wanted them etc., I just never felt proud of what I had created (It’s me not Visio lets be clear).

I stumbled across a video from https://twitter.com/LiorKamrat

Lior teaches you how to use PowerPoint, yes you read that correctly, PowerPoint to create really awesome looking architectural diagrams – definitely watch all of his video if you like me don’t get on well with Visio etc.

Whilst tweeting about this Dave Brannan asked if I had used draw.io inside Visual Studio Code, I had dabbled with draw.io but not within VS Code, so I installed the extension and started looking into it. Not bad I must say, I do like it and its very easy to create cracking diagrams.

Here is one I created from a sample diagram from the Microsoft docs about using Private Endpoints from a Web App to a SQL Server Database. I can reuse these super easily and use the GitHub repository David-Summers/Azure-Design: My Azure stencil collection for Visio. Highly functional and always up to date. (github.com) to copy in .png or .svg files which ever you prefer.

How about Draw.io?

If you install the draw.io integration extension by Henning Dietrichs to VS Code and then crate new empty file with the .drawio extension then you end up with this:-

This means you can use VS Code along with Draw.io to create diagrams – very cool.

Summary

I like the PowerPoint way of doing it as I can open up existing diagrams and easily create new diagrams off it it, I am sure you can do the same in any tool but I do particularly like how the PowerPoint diagrams turn out.

Massive thanks to Lior Kamrat for creating the video and I hope you find this post useful.

In Lior’s video he has some awesome links to to Azure Icon sets and example PowerPoints.

If you have questions reach out to me here in the comments below or on twitter.

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