Diagram templates

A C4 system context diagram, a "who uses it and what it depends on" slide, or an integration overview: one system, one to four actors that use it, and one to five external systems it calls or that call it, each link saying what it does.

Three to twelve components that call or depend on each other with no fixed tiers, such as a microservice call map, a service dependency graph, or data lineage between systems, with links labeled by protocol or what flows (gRPC, REST, events).

One system shown as two to four copies that are compared side by side: dev, staging, and production environments with promotion between them, region A, region B, and disaster recovery with replication, or blue and green stacks.

Event flows through one broker, bus, or topic hub with one to five producers and one to five consumers, such as Kafka topics, Google Pub/Sub, SNS fanning out to SQS queues, EventBridge rules, or a webhook gateway delivering to several handlers; built for fan-in and fan-out.

Two to fourteen components placed in two to five networks, clusters, subnets, or accounts, such as an AWS VPC with public and private subnets or a Kubernetes cluster with namespaces, optionally inside one region with users or third-party services outside.

A layered system where components rely on specific components in the layer directly below: software layers from experience through services to data, an operating model from strategy through operations to delivery teams, or a data stack from reports through warehouse and pipelines to sources.

Two to four tiers, environments or network zones that a request or data flow crosses in order, each holding one to three services: a cloud web stack from edge to data, an IoT path from devices through gateways to analytics, a payments flow from channels through processing to ledgers.

A system of two to sixteen components arranged in two to five layers, such as a web app's stack or a SaaS platform from clients through edge and services to data, with calls between neighboring layers.

Two to fourteen components inside containers that hold other containers, such as an AWS account with a VPC and its subnets, a GCP project with a VPC, or a Kubernetes cluster with its namespaces.

Data moving through two to five stages of tools, such as an analytics stack, an ETL or ELT pipeline, event streaming, or an ML feature pipeline, with two to fifteen tools and labeled flows between neighboring stages.

Three to eight hops of one request in order, such as a request through CDN, gateway, services, and database, an auth or checkout request trace, or a webhook delivery path, optionally with the protocol or measured time of each link.

Security reviews, threat-model data-flow diagrams at the zone level, and network segmentation: two to five zones from least to most trusted (such as internet, DMZ, internal network, restricted data) with two to fourteen components and the control on each crossing (WAF, mTLS, API key, VPN, firewall rule).

Dense binary dependencies including cycles and reciprocal edges.

A data model, such as the tables of a shop, a booking system, or a school database, where each entity lists its fields and each relationship states how many relate to how many.

Suits an enterprise or business capability map graded by maturity, an investment heat map (divest, maintain, invest), a function-by-function readiness or risk rating, or a service catalog marked by coverage: what the organization does, grouped by domain, and how each capability rates.

A simple venue wayfinding infographic for an office visit, event venue or pop-up store.

Suits showing how inputs (raw materials, data, requests, ingredients, or factors) are transformed by a central process, engine, or system into outputs (products, insights, deliverables, or results).

Two ordered sources allocating one common quantity to three ordered uses, with source one feeding use one or two and source two feeding use two or three.

Supplied flows of one common quantity from named sources to named destinations, such as traffic routing or expenditure allocation.

Show who talks to whom and in what order, such as an API call, a login or payment flow, or a handoff between teams, with up to fourteen messages between two to six participants.