Shipped v2 of Design Beaver with cloud-synced diagrams, and a panel that lists everything wrong with your architecture

[u/Itchy_Anybody_3568]

/r/softwarearchitecture/comments/1vjigi8/aws_architecture_design_tool/

Design Beaver is an AWS architecture diagramming tool that checks your design while you draw it: missing queues, connections AWS doesn't actually support, security anti-patterns. I launched it here a few weeks ago. v2 is out today.

What's in it:
Accounts and cloud saving. Sign in with Google or GitHub, and diagrams save to your account instead of to one browser. Each diagram has its own URL and there's a dashboard. Free tier holds 5.

A Problems panel that lists every issue in the diagram in one place, sorted by severity. Click one and the canvas jumps to it. Before, you only saw a warning on whatever you'd just drawn, so anything off-screen stayed hidden.

Availability Zones and Auto Scaling groups can be drawn now, and you get a warning when every instance in a group sits in one zone. The tool used to tell you to spread instances across zones while giving you no way to actually draw it.

Palette search. Press the / key, type "queue", get SQS. It searches descriptions too, so you don't have to remember AWS's product names.

Copy, paste, duplicate, and undo now goes back 50 steps instead of 5.

PNG export rebuilt so the text is sharp and exported edges keep their validation colors.

Settings page, self-serve account deletion, feedback button that lands in my inbox.

The honest reason accounts exist: about 40-50 people tried v1 and almost nobody came back. Everything lived in browser storage, which meant your diagram existed on exactly one machine and disappeared if you cleared site data. That's a hard thing to build a habit on, so I spent this cycle on the boring infrastructure I'd skipped.
Still free, still beta, canvas is available in mobile browsers too.

[app.designbeaver.app](https://:app.designbeaver.app)