Taking a first look at Google Cloud Architecture Diagramming Tool

In February 2022, the Google Cloud Platform team launched their Google Cloud Architecture Diagramming Tool. It looked awesome, and we’re really excited to try out the one-click deployment option. Let’s take a look.

During the week, Google Developer Advocate Priyanka Vergadia announced the launch of an architecture diagramming tool. The announcement created a buzz, especially as alternatives often require using icon sets inside more generic diagramming tools like Lucid or Visio.

Whatever your role within Technology, chances are you will have produced or referenced architectural diagrams at some point in your career. Whether you’re all-in for UML modeling, or just drawing components, or data flows, or more simpler constructs, the visualisation offered via such diagrams is often critical — and the conversations around them that they initiate are just as important. You may have just drawn them on a whiteboard, diagrams allow you to tell a story, collaborate within your team, with other stakeholders, even your customers.

The Google Cloud Architecture Diagramming Tool includes all its services, neatly categorized, and expands on the basics with some out of the box reference architectures. These give a huge boost to its capabilities and allows users to begin with off-the-shelf pre-built examples for common solutions such as data science, Machine Learning, websites, CI/CD, microservices, compute, and more.

And if that wasn’t enough — you can bring a number of these reference architectures to life with a one-click deployment feature, where you can generate all the components from the architectural diagram straight in your Google project.

Sounds amazing, huh? Let’s get started.

First Look

On opening up the tool and it feels just like Excalidraw — a virtual collaborative whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel to them — this is a collaboration tool that I already use a lot. No surprises really that it looks and feels the same, that is because the fine print shows that it is built upon…