• in additional to the design phase, diagrams can aslo be used for analysis and monitoring the current architecture.
• to do that, we need to export the 'metadata' from other sources, e.g. terraform, aws cli, etc. then generate the diagrams.

diagrams-exporters export the metadata from existing tools, and generate the diagrams.

https://github.com/hashicorp/learn-terraform-no-code-provisioning

https://github.com/hashicorp/learn-terraform-provision-eks-cluster

https://github.com/hashicorp/learn-terraform-multicloud-kubernetes-eks

• depends on the patterns in diagrams-patterns (e.g. vpc with igw, subnet and nat)

Install the package:

pipx install diagrams-exporters

Exectute the following command in your terraform workspace, it will generate terraform graph and export to Diagrams.

diagrams-exporters terraform
# use -d to specify the output directory/file
diagrams-exporters terraform -o diagrams-exported
diagrams-exporters terraform -o dist/diagrams-exported

If you have existing .dot file

diagrams-exporters dot -f existing.dot
diagrams-exporters dot -f existing.dot -o diagrams-exported
diagrams-exporters dot -f existing.dot -o dist/diagrams-exported

Currently, the diagrams-patterns and diagrams-exporters are built as 'diagrams'-extensions. But since the diagrams is inactive, introducing new tools is a necessary step, e.g. d2.

At that time, the diagrams-patterns should be a standalone tool, which provide a standard DSL to describe the common patterns in cloud architecture (or other kinds of diagrams). Then, you can translate the DSL to different tools, e.g. diagrams, d2, etc.

The diagrams-exporters plays another role to facilitate with productive tools, e.g. terraform, aws cli, etc. It read the metadata, convert to DSL, then generate the diagrams.

A possible structure is:

flowchart BT
  subgraph diagram-exporters
    terraform-exporter
    awscli-exporter
    kubectl-exporter
  end

  subgraph diagrams-patterns
    subgraph common-patterns
      c4-pattern
      layer-arch-pattern    
    end

    subgraph cloud-patterns
      aws-pattern
      azure-pattern
    end

    subgraph dsl
      dsl-parser

      dsl-to-diagrams
      dsl-to-d2
      dsl-to-mermaid
    end
  end

  diagrams-patterns --> diagram-exporters
  diagrams --> diagrams-patterns
  d2 --> diagrams-patterns
  plantuml --> diagrams-patterns
  
  graphviz --> diagrams
  graphviz --> d2

  plantuml

• graphviz & dot

  • https://github.com/pydot/pydot

• d2

  • https://github.com/terrastruct/d2
  • https://github.com/MrBlenny/py-d2

• read tfstate and generate graph

  • https://github.com/cycloidio/inframap
  • https://github.com/28mm/blast-radius

• read aws cli and generate graph

  • https://github.com/Cloud-Architects/cloudiscovery

• other terraform interesting tools

  • https://github.com/cycloidio/terracost
  • https://pypi.org/project/python-hcl2/