Getting Started

Creating AWS platform diagrams is straight forward - all the AWS service constructs are available from the Toolbox or from the Browser in the AWS Packages. This allows you to create expressive diagrams containing element items such as EC2 compute and RDS databases, as well as container items such as VPCs and Subnets.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Architecture provides all of the graphics (icons and images) required to build AWS architecture diagrams. The icons and images are provided by a Model Wizard framework pattern, which must be imported into your model before you can start creating AWS architecture diagrams. The Amazon AWS Web Images pattern contains over 350 Image Assets that can be dragged-and-dropped onto diagrams.

Working with AWS diagrams is straight forward; this topic will guide you through setting up AWS modeling in Enterprise Architect, creating diagrams and tracing to other project Artifacts.

Selecting the Perspective

Enterprise Architect partitions the tool's extensive features into Perspectives; this ensures that you can focus on a specific task and work with the tools you need without the distraction of other features. To work with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) features you first need to select the AWS Architecture Perspective:

<perspective name> > > Analysis > AWS Architecture

Setting the Perspective ensures that the Amazon Web Services diagrams, their tool boxes and other features of the Perspective are available by default.

Example Diagram

An example diagram provides a visual introduction to the topic and allows you to see some of the important elements and connectors that are created in specifying or describing the way a Cloud Architecture is defined including: Availability Zones, VPC's, Subnets, EC2, RDS and more.

Import Amazon Web Services Patterns

Before you can start creating AWS diagrams to specify or document your Cloud services you must first import the graphics from a pattern.  This will inject all the AWS icons as components into the selected location in the Browser window.

Create an Amazon Web Services Diagram

Once the AWS images have been imported creating AWS diagrams is straight forward as all the icons including Products and Resources such as EC2 and RDS and Containers such as VPCs and Availability Zones are available from the Browser window and Toolbox respectively. You will simply create a diagram and then drag-and-drop elements from the AWS Browser Packages or the Toolbox.

The Browser window showing AWS database Product Images.

Tracing to Project Artifacts

Enterprise Architect is a collaboration platform for all disciplines and one of the great advantages of modeling Amazon web Services is that parts of the cloud based infrastructure can be related to other domains in your projects. You can trace elements in the AWS diagrams to a wide range of other artifacts including: Requirements, Business Rules, Database Schemas, On-Premise Infrastructure and more.

More Information

This section provides useful links to other topics and resources that you might find useful when working with the Amazon Web Services tool features.