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Cloud Architecture Concepts in System Architecture Diagrams

If you are developing a distributed application for easy scaling or just want to use any new cloud computing offerings from Amazon, Google or Microsoft, there are some typical concepts or components that you usually provide with:

  • distributed storage (aka S3)
  • asynchronous, long message queues (aka SQS)
  • non-relational / non-transactional databases (such as SimpleDB, Google BigTable, Azure SQL Services)
  • distributed background work pool
  • load-balanced, edge services that handle user requests (often virtualized)
  • distributed caches (e.g. memcached)
  • CDN (content delivery network such as Akamai)

Now that it comes to designing and sketching an architecture using such patterns, are there any commonly used characters that I could use? Or even download with some good Visio stencils? :)

It should not be an official system, such as UML, but I think it would be great if there were characters that everyone knows and understands, for example, we usually used forms for databases or documents. I think it would be important not to mix it with traditional concepts, like a regular file system (local or network server / SAN) or a relational database.

Simply put, I want to be able to draw some conclusions about application scalability or data consistency issues by simply looking at the overview diagram of the system architecture.

Update: Thank you very much for your answers. I like the idea of ​​putting a small “cloud” symbol on traditional symbols. However, I leave this thread open only if someone finds certain characters (maybe in a book or so) - or downloaded some stitched Visio stencils;)

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Here are two character sets that go well with concepts on cloud platforms.

For Windows Azure: http://davidpallmann.blogspot.com/2011/07/windows-azure-design-patterns-part-1.html (download here )

EDIT Feb 2014 ==> Here is a more complete set recently released by Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=41937 Now this is the best option for Windows Azure.

Amazon Web Services: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/12/introducing-aws-simple-icons-for-your-architecture-diagrams.html

And @markus was clearly ahead of the curve since he posted this question long before they became available.

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I don’t know any distinguishing characters, but if you need to, I would go for the traditional ones and add a small cloud symbol for each of them. Thus, everyone knows the traditional meaning - and on the abstract layer it does not matter whether the cloud is or not, and the cloud symbol adds the information that it launches in the cloud.

But explain the symbols if you want to introduce this to the client.

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It would be interesting to see the visio template. From a very high level point of view, this will be done to put clould over a traditional database, but this is not enough to express the full import of cloud components, especially when you need to include them in a diagram - for example asynch message buses cheers - kalyan

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