Arcentry Blog on Arcentry — Interactive cloud diagrams

A Simple Guide to Europe's Complicated Cloud Provider Landscape

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re looking to run a large-scale compute project in the US, you’re spoiled for choice. There’s a wide range of capable cloud offerings, from IBM and Oracle to Cloudflare and DigitalOcean. But chances are, you’ll end up with one of the big three: Microsoft’s Azure, Google Cloud, or Amazon Web Services (AWS).

These platforms support massive scale, offer an incredible range of products and services, and provide straightforward setup and super-granular, usage-based billing.

Isometric Mermaid Diagrams with Arcentry

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever looked at a thing and thought, “This is nice… but could it be code?” Probably. There’s infrastructure as code. There’s policy as code. There’s even music as code.

So, of course, there’s also diagrams as code. We sort of knew that back in 2018, when we created the Infrastructure Description Format: a way to describe the visual representation of compute infrastructure as code.

There were only two problems.

For one, the name. IDF seemed harmless enough in 2018. Today, those three letters can set off flags in some AI systems, leading to reviews for illicit activity. Not quite what we had in mind when we asked for a database and a load balancer.

Arcentry is back - and better than ever.

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Six years ago, I wrote a somewhat heartfelt blog post called Discontinuing Arcentry.

In it, I talked about walking my dog (a very fluffy Samoyed) until she didn’t want to walk anymore, while trying to decide whether I should sell Arcentry.

In the end, I did.

Five years later, I somehow managed to get it back. How exactly that happened is a story for another time.

Service Mesh VS API Gateway VS Message Queue - when to use what?

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s skip the pitch for microservices - you already know what they are and why they make sense. In fact, few topics have received as much coverage in recent years as the unsurprising fact that breaking down a big thing into many small ones can make it easier to handle.

The trouble is: once we’ve shattered our monolith, how do we put it back together into a larger system that still makes sense? Despite what Istio, Kong or Kafka enthusiasts will tell you, there’s more than one answer to this question and different solutions are differently suited for different needs.

Talking about tech is so hard, its a wonder we can do it at all

Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago I was watching AWS re:Invent, presenting its ever-flowing stream of new and innovative cloud services. And I couldn’t help but admire what I saw: Not just the services themselves, but especially the ease with which the presenters navigated the sky-high piles of ever thicker abstraction layers that constitute modern information technologies.

Of course, this talent isn’t exclusive to the people we see on stage - we all use it on a daily basis, often without noticing. Just imagining Amazon announcing its new time-series-database-as-a-service offering with all abstractions removed:

How to create 3D Cloud Architecture Diagrams with Arcentry

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Branching lines, walls around a VPN, custom components, layers and sharing are just some of the features I cover in this tutorial video - have a look:

Democratizing Industry 4.0

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Every couple of decades the way we produce things gets turned upside-down.

It happened in the early 19th century when mechanical looms and steam-engines caused productivity to skyrocket. It happened in the 20th century with the advent of electricity and mass production on assembly-lines. It happened in the 1990s when computer-controlled robots took over from human workers - and it is happening right now, in what’s shaping up to be the most fundamental shift yet.

At 22 years old, Postgres might just be the most advanced database yet

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As a techy, many of the debates I engage in can be boiled down to just one question: Should we pick the new thing or the proven one? As passionate as this question is discussed, there are a handful of technologies where the answer is easy: Why not both?

Postgres is such a technology. Originally released in 1996 (and effectively developed since 1982), it is now 22 years old - yet in many respects, it is the most modern database management system there is. Not only does it come with a simply mindboggling set of features, but it also transcends being a pure database and evolved into a fully programmable, integrated data environment, complete with its own programming language PL/pgSQL.

What comes after serverless?

Mon, 03 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As humans, we have this weird tendency: We believe that however things are right now, that’s the way they’ll always be. It’s not that we don’t acknowledge the existence of change or past progress - but somehow, we rationalize that the status quo necessarily constitutes a peak or final stage in its development and we’re struggling to imagine how it could ever be superseded.

This seems particularly true for discussions about serverless lately: It’s just an isolated function - right? How much less could you possibly run?

Four predictions for the next decade of Cloud Computing

Thu, 08 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The cloud’s key promise of “less infrastructure, more business value” - holds as true as ever. But the way the cloud delivers on this promise - and the way that users adopt it - is undergoing significant change.

It is, of course, always hard to make predictions about something as young and dynamic as cloud infrastructure, but I believe there are four distinct trends that are likely to accelerate over the next decade and that are already fundamentally reshaping what “the cloud” really is:

An introduction to medieval cities and cloud security

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Panorama of the Cité de Carcassonne by Chensiyuan CC BY-SA 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes, trust is THE most important resource - something vividly apparent when standing atop the towering walls of Carcassonne, a fortified city in south-western France. For centuries, its citizens were subject to countless sieges and invasion attempts, leaving them with little reason to trust anyone out on the open planes surrounding the city - and yet they had to exert some degree of trust in order to trade, to travel, to work on their farms and fields and to keep connections to other villages - in short, to function as a society.

Arcentry API: Programmable Cloud Diagrams

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been quite a few late evenings and coffee-sustained nights, but today we are excited to announce that Arcentry diagrams have just become programmable.

But…why?

Keeping track of the bigger picture is one of the hardest things when running any cloud infrastructure. Existing tools stop at the component level and even cloud-provider dashboards are broken down into individual services and their respective instances. There’s no layer above that lets you see or control what your cloud actually does or looks like. And that’s a shame - because having a holistic view and seeing problems and bottlenecks in their wider context can be invaluable when it comes to debugging, maintaining and optimizing complex deployments.

What the f*** is the edge?

Thu, 09 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I still remember a call with a potential investor I had a while ago at deepstreamhub, a company selling realtime data servers to enterprises. Things were going well, we churned through the technical concepts, use cases, customer adoption and business metrics and she seemed to like what she heard. But then her tone of voice lowered - a long pause ensued, and I could tell that she was about to ask something really, REALLY important. I braced myself - here it came:

How to choose a database in 2018

Tue, 07 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I met a friend for lunch the other day and we were chatting about the jungle of databases and data storage solution out there- and what a jungle it is: At the time of writing DB Engines Ranking lists more than 340 actively developed and up to date databases to choose from - all of which essentially present slightly different solutions to the same problem: storing and retrieving text-based information. To help you navigate this jungle, this article tries to offer a simple framework for deciding which database is right for your project.

Embed interactive cloud diagrams directly into your website

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes your architecture gets too complex to fit into a single picture to put on your website or presentation. Sometimes you want to give your blog’s readers something a little more special and cool. Whatever it is - Arcentry’s new embed feature might just do the trick.

It lets you embed your diagram in an interactive 3D viewer directly into your app. Here’s what that looks like:

To give it a go, log into your Arcentry account and go to export->embed in website or <a href="#" @click=“showForm(‘signup’)">sign up to Arcentry for free.

Our (not so smooth) journey productising a serverless app on AWS

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Serverless is the future. I’m sure of it. The cloud’s great promise is to help companies focus on business value rather than infrastructure - and serverless is our best take delivering on this promise so far.

But the current reality of serverless is something I am far less sure of. Navigating the jungle of Lambda Functions, API Gateways, S3 Buckets, VPNs, VPCs, Cloudfront Templates, Log groups, Internet Gateways, Policy Attachments, IAM roles and all the other bits and bops required does not quite feel like what we had in mind when we envisioned the simple, self-orchestrating, serverless world of tomorrow.

Scaling webapps for newbs & non-techies

Fri, 27 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This guide summarizes the basic principles of scaling - from a single server to a web app capable of serving millions of users. It is aimed at newcomers and non-developers working in technical fields - so if you've just deployed your multi-cloud-terraform-vpn-setup, this one is not for you.

For everyone else though: Let’s get started!

Scaling…wut?!?

You’ve just finished building your website, online store, social network or whatever else it is you are up to, put it online and things are going splendidly: A few hundred visitors pass by your site every day, requests are answered quickly, orders are processed immediately and everything is humming along nicely.

Why building a cloud management AI starts with a diagram drawing app

Tue, 24 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I still remember the first web app I’ve ever deployed. I did what most people were doing back then: I paid a hosting provider for a “v-host” - a tiny folder on a server I shared with hundreds of other users. It ran PHP scripts and allowed access to a small section of a shared MySQL database. It wasn’t fast, had no means of scaling and security was …well… debatable. But it worked.