[mithunshanbhag]

Good question.

While there are many tools for sketching flowcharts, mind-maps, UML diagrams etc, cloudskew has cloud architecture diagrams as its sole focus.

Also planning your cloud architecture requires several round-trips between your drawing tool, document editor (for architecture documentation), looking up reference architectures, googling for AWS documentation (for resource docs, pricing details etc).

CloudSkew can reduce some of these pains today:

1. It already has a built-in document editor (so architecture documentation + diagrams can reside side-by-side).

2. Links to official docs (including pricing details, SLA) for all AWS, Azure and GCP resources are available within the app itself.

3. Bigger icon set (as far as cloud diagrams are concerned).

Later in the year, some cloudskew features will be coming to make cloud architecture planning easier.

[chessmango]

These are all pretty killer. For non-generalist stuff this is great - I work for AWS myself and arch diagrams are generally draw.io for me, and considering this is a web service I'd be unlikely to use it but in another life, absolutely.

I feel like non-generalist tools like this are useful for exactly what they're good at, especially along with doc links etc.

Any plans to do this cool things like Cloudcraft with describes to pre-populate diagrams? I'd imagine this would be quite an undertaking for a cloud-agnostic service.

Kudos!

[mithunshanbhag]

Thanks.

1. Does your team/org maintain a central diagram repository? Or do team members use their diagram tool of choice and then export diagram into a central doc library (e.g. github markdown)?

2. The short-term plan is to add more diagram templates (e.g. VPCs, K8s clusters) to help folks author complex architectures quickly.

3. There are plans to release a paid enterprise version later in the year with features like SSO, customer-managed-encryption-keys, customer-managed-storage, team collaboration etc.

Overall, CloudSkew will remain focused on cloud diagram only.

[chessmango]

1. Yes/no - my own team is more the latter as I'm more customer-facing and lone-ranger-y, but other teams do a lot more collab and keep things central. As far as I'm aware though, it's a bit of a mixed bag, so getting to the point where we're all on the same page would be fantastic.

2. This sounds great. I like the k8s angle particularly as well - I have yet to find much useful in that area, so having a service that's good at it would be wonderful.

3. This I'd imagine would be end-game at AWS. Specifically ability to handle own storage and keys would be an immediate sell here. We've just taken on Slack Enterprise Grid for basically this (granted this was a 2-way deal: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280829/slack-amazon-aws-...) so clearly we're up for it :D

I get the focus though. Seems like a good opportunity to set yourself up as best-in-class for this type of thing. I'll certainly be using CloudSkew for anything I need privately. :)

[mithunshanbhag]

Thank you for the pointers! This is great info.

Also, please feel free to file feature requests or bugs/issues over on github: https://github.com/cloudskew/cloudskew/issues