Show HN: Stackdraft – create and present 3D cloud architecture diagrams

Show HN: Stackdraft – create and present 3D cloud architecture diagrams(stackdraft.io)

8 points by mkarnicki 7 years ago | 6 comments

mkarnicki 7 years ago |

Hi all,

This is my very first post on HackerNews, although I’ve been a silent follower of this amazing, diverse community for years now.

My name is Michał Karnicki and I wanted to share what I've spent the last 6 months on, days and nights, and most of my savings. I'm equally excited and nervous to share it with you all :)! Stackdraft is a fully bootstrapped project.

The longer version of this story is actually available on the Pricing page, so I'll keep it short and sweet. Stackdraft allows you to create AND present 3D cloud architecture diagrams. You're not fixed to a single cloud provider or the isometric projection. It currently support AWS, GCP and DigitalOcean icon sets, but I have plans for more fancy 3D models as well, besides other things I mention on the website. Inspired by both the good sides and limitations of other diagramming solutions, I decided to try create my own. And that's how Stackdraft was born.

Stackdraft is in Beta, that's why there's an Early Adopters plan on the pricing page. I'm hoping to get some initial users seriously interested in the project as a tool for their work, close registration (so I'm not overwhelmed - haha I wish, eh ;)?), and use the feedback from them to polish the tool. If you're interested in cloud architectures, please help me shape the future of Stackdraft and consider subscribing - there's 14 day trial, 30 day money back guarantee, and it currently costs a BigMac set per month :).

There is a famous quote by Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn: If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.

So here I am! More than happy to answer your questions :). Thank you for checking out Stackdraft!

mkarnicki 7 years ago | |

All right guys, looks like I can get some sleep now ;). If there's more questions, I'll definitely reply to them tomorrow, thanks!

geoah 7 years ago |

This seems like a nice (and non aws-only) replacement for cloudcraft, thank you.

I wonder why both services limit their assets to only architecture-level components and provide people a generic library with assets for uml or other diagrams. I'd definitely be interested in a 3d alternative to eg lucidcharts.

mkarnicki 7 years ago | |

Thank you for your kind words. Yes - Stackdraft was partially inspired by Cloudcrafts sole focus on AWS. I don't blame Tomas though, only on surface supporting multiple providers seems like an easy task - I'm sure it's not. At this early stage of Stackdraft I focused on diagramming and presenting and naturally plan to add more advanced features.

To answer your second statement - I think it's a matter of doing one thing only and one thing well. While I do plan to support sub-resource level items like containers, I doubt the tool will reach as far as UML/software modeling, at least not in the foreseeable future. Do note I received lots of feedback from a LucidCharts users, who draws architecture diagrams, and in general there's a few good parts of LucidCharts I'd like to take example from.

Regardless, I will always welcome any ideas for Stackdraft, so thank you very much for your feedback :)! I appreciate you took time to leave this comment.

caio1982 7 years ago |

Nice graphics, I really liked it is "multi-provider" :-)

mkarnicki 7 years ago | |

Thank you! I really hope to improve the graphics further with postprocessing, more custom 3D models, etc.

Yes, 'multi-provider' was one of the reasons I built it :). You can naturally mix the icon sets as you wish, if you have cross cloud infrastructure, which is becoming more popular these days for HA purposes.

Thanks for your comment!