An architecture diagram is useful when its scope is clear. Use a context view to explain who uses a system, a container view to show its major parts, and a deployment view to discuss where those parts run. These examples give each question its own starting point.
Choose this for an AWS deployment discussion involving public and private subnets and more than one availability zone. Replace the example resources with your design and review the engine's findings; a clean diagram check is not a security assessment of deployed infrastructure.
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Choose this for a first conversation with stakeholders. Keep people and external systems around the boundary of your system, and leave internal services for a separate container view.
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Choose this to explain the applications, services and data stores inside a system. Keep the abstraction consistent: C4 containers are runnable applications or data stores, not necessarily Docker containers.
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Choose this for a compact diagram-as-code view of a browser, load balancer, API pool, database and cache. It is useful when you want readable text and labelled connections without a large cloud-specific vocabulary.
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Choose this when you prefer arranging an AWS VPC diagram on a visual canvas. Public and private subnets frame the Internet-to-application path. This template opens in Weave, which requires Starter or above.
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Choose this to discuss service-to-service communication and distinguish synchronous calls from asynchronous messaging. Review edge meanings and ownership boundaries before adding every endpoint to the same picture.
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Choose this for an AWS deployment discussion involving public and private subnets and more than one availability zone. Replace the example resources with your design and review the engine's findings; a clean diagram check is not a security assessment of deployed infrastructure.
Put the system or environment in the title and explain which connections the arrows represent. A request, a deployment dependency and a flow of data are different relationships; mixing them without a legend creates ambiguous architecture.
Keep the diagram connected to evidence
Review the example against the actual services, manifests or specifications you maintain. Living diagrams can compare supported public sources with a cloud-project figure; they do not inspect arbitrary private repositories or prove every architectural property.
Make the example your own
Reading the public examples and source is free. Editing requires an account with access to the named workstation. Free includes the Studio with up to 3 saved figures and 3 cloud Library projects; dedicated workstations such as Weave and BPMN start on Starter.
Replace example labels, counts and policies before using a template for your work. Optional AI features and exports have their own plan and usage limits.
