No. Architecture is like art. With sufficient practice it is commonly expressed with ease, but for most people it will forever be a dark mystery not well understood. The tragedy there is descriptions are insufficient, like a foreign language, if you are not already well practiced in architecture. The result then is just a plan and otherwise explicitly assigning tasks.

I'd love to see something like this work! At the same time, I used a tag-based system to track services before, it worked at some level for resource tracking, and identifying machines running that nobody knew what they are for. I am also interested in the exact use-case you would like to solve and what size of infrastructure / company you are aiming for.

A couple of questions:

- Tag-based diagram creation: what information would you put into a tag and how are tags managed (manually? automatically assigned in some way?)

- Resource tracking: what is a resource? are they machines / nodes? or do you plan to track database/cache/queues/etc? How do you define waste? We used the simple definition that a machine with no tag, though that is relatively simple and useful at the beginning when you are mapping out the infra you do not know, but might not be great on an ongoing basis.

- High-level overview: how do you know if serviceA is interacting with serviceB? Many cases it would also be great to know if services are interacting with 3rd parties and that is also a big part of the infrastructure. Knowing that serviceA and serviceB is interacting is only the first step, though knowing why they are interacting (is it a critical part of serviceA? what is the business value of that connection? how is the customer affected if it gets broken?) and why was it implemented in a given way? (sync/async, retries and timeouts, what matters to the customer). Communicating this type of context of the architecture seems hard and auto-generated diagrams usually fail to do.

- Infrastructure management: I am not that averse about giving some delete rights for the infrastructure, maybe you can get partial rights, though I assume a lot of companies are already using something for upscale/downscale and might have strict processes for deleting things. What if a delete needs an approval or code review like step?

Re 1: We have stacks of excel workbooks and worksheets documenting all assets, will you be providing templates where we can plug in these values and it gets imported Re 2: Same we consolidate all daily usage reports available from the cloud vendors Re 3: Would your tool consolidate data as a CMDB, then it would be good Re 4: Suggestions is fine, access to directly modify/delete NO

I think it's a good idea. We don't update our diagrams as much as we should, so new joiners struggle to get their heads around what's happening.

But it'll be very hard to get it past our architect. Maybe if it's open source so we can test and prove the value before using a 3rd party.

I think you should look at the UI for ArgoCD. It has a UI that has some diagrams and it's all driven by kubernetes and gitops. Note you don't make the diagrams in here, but it makes the diagrams by itself.

I might be a customer for 1 and 3 if the cost wasn’t too high. I don’t want 4, would be uncomfortable giving a third party tool the ability to ruin my business.

Would the diagram creation be automated? Because I would absolutely not connect some SaaS product to my production AWS account

All this just sounds like what a proper engineering team should be doing anyway.