Shameless plug: If you're looking to develop a web app with diagramming functionality and need considerably more features, I make GoJS: <a href="https://gojs.net/latest/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://gojs.net/latest/index.html</a><p>In addition to basic stuff like zooming and moving nodes GoJS has undo management, data binding, templates, lots of built in tools and layouts and a large showcase of customizations of each, animations, palettes, overviews, etc. It's <i>not</i> free, but if you're looking to use a library to buy developer time, I think it's a much better deal than this offering.
This seems very specific to their IoT products, so it's weird they gave it such a generic name, like "Diagram Maker", which makes it seem like a competitor for something more generally capable like diagrams.net/draw.io.
Why would you use this over diagrams.net/draw.io, which integrates with far more tools (Google Apps, Atlassian tools, Sphinx) and can take text input (Mermaid), and embed editable copies in other file formats like .svg/.png?
Tools like this can be very useful in supporting operational use cases in addition to documentation. The tricky part with cloud is how to effectively visualize infrastructure that is composed of a variety of services and attributes. If you have a VPC in each of two regions with dynamodb, s3, ecs, alb, third party providers with access via cross account roles, etc etc it gets tricky to sensibly lay out and demonstrate relationships between the indivdiual components.<p>Hopefully this will get traction and they will start to build in some of this intelligence and perspectives into the application (presumably as a plugin).
Link to Github repo: <a href="https://github.com/awslabs/diagram-maker" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/awslabs/diagram-maker</a>
For people who are curious to see some of the functionality, there are a few demos linked from the documentation here:<p><a href="https://awslabs.github.io/diagram-maker/explore/demos.html" rel="nofollow">https://awslabs.github.io/diagram-maker/explore/demos.html</a>
Given that AWS continues to spin out more and more purpose-built technology as needs come up, I wonder whether AWS's long-term strategy is to:<p>- Continue to spin out products to support common business use cases.<p>- Expose commonly used functionality from products via this WYSIWYG tool.<p>- Allow drag and drop programming by connecting services.<p>- Lambdas are the primary way that a business bridges gaps between OOB functionality and business requirements, but are still connected up via this WYSWYG tool once created.<p>It would be a while before it was useful to FAANG, but maybe mom and pop businesses could cheaply partner with AWS experts to ship custom software?
Looks promising, but it's hard to tell without a more full-featured demo.<p>I'm comparing this to Node-RED [0] which is pretty robust and has a large ecosystem. Ultimately, I think the value in diagramming platforms is not just in the software, but the community around it that creates plugins/extensions for different use-cases.<p>[0] <a href="https://nodered.org/" rel="nofollow">https://nodered.org/</a>
If you go to the Github repository, it's more understandable and it's actually pretty nice. I wish my company had a use case for this, so I could play with it.
<i>For instance, with Diagram Maker, application developers can enhance the experience for end customers by enabling them to intuitively and visually build cloud resources required by cloud services such as Workflow Engines (AWS Step Functions) or Infrastructure as Code (AWS CloudFormation) to get the relationships and hierarchies working.</i><p>Does this mean that Step Functions and CloudFormation will adopt this library? Both already have similar visualizations.
From the screenshots this looked like it was built with [0] or [1] but from their repo it's actually completely homegrown.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/uber/react-digraph" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/uber/react-digraph</a>
[1] <a href="https://github.com/wbkd/react-flow" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wbkd/react-flow</a>
Similar project in Java: <a href="https://github.com/miho/VWorkflows" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/miho/VWorkflows</a>
I've tried so many of these diagramming tools (mermaid, draw.io, figma, lucid chart). But none of them seem to ever match the effectiveness and simplicity of PowerPoint. Why reinvent the wheel so many times?