A visual representation of a system's components, their relationships, and how they interact within a cloud or software environment. Like a blueprint for a building, an architecture diagram shows the structural design of an application or infrastructure, including servers, databases, networks, and external services. Cloud architecture diagrams are essential for planning, documentation, and communication between teams. AWS provides the Architecture Icons library, Azure offers Visio templates, GCP has its architecture diagramming tool, and OCI provides reference architecture diagrams.
A startup's engineering team creates a cloud architecture diagram showing their three-tier web application: a CloudFront CDN and S3 for static assets, an Application Load Balancer distributing traffic to EC2 instances running in an Auto Scaling group, and an RDS PostgreSQL database with a read replica. The diagram helps new engineers understand the system and guides the team during scaling discussions.
All major cloud providers offer architecture diagramming tools and icon libraries to help teams visualize and communicate their infrastructure designs.