Nick's system design library

For excalidraw.com drawing board. I put together an extensive and stylish architecture components library to help build clean and precise diagrams.

Usage:
Download the .excalidrawlib file and drag it into an open Excalidraw tab in your browser.

Here’s a quick 2-minute draft of some generic AI service as an example:

Components

All components where designed to look good with both strict and sloppy drawing styles, as well as work well with attached arrows.

Service architecture

Services — base building blocks of complex systems.

• Service instance
• Service layer
• Scaled service
• Auth service
• Payment service
• Inference (AI) service
• Edge node/service
• CRON job
• Serverless function

Appendices — add them to any block to highlight advanced behavior.

• Retry policy appendix
• Outbox messaging appendix
• Rate limiter appendix
• Circuit breaker appendix

Databases

Database selection of many flavors. Queues and patterns included!

• Generic Database
• Relational Database
• Cache (appendix)
• Document storage
• Message Queue
• CQRS database pattern
• Hyper scale database (consistent hashing)
• Object storage
• Key-Value storage
• Text index (search)
• Columnar database
• Cold storage
• Graph database
• Timeseries database
• Vector database

Cloud

• Generic cloud
• CDN
• Cloud payment
• Cloud inference (AI)

Users

• Generic user
• User group
• Web browser
• A laptop
• A smartphone

Infra and Misc

Crucial components that don't really fit into other groups.

• Load balancer
• Observability stack - Logs, metrics, traces, alerts
• Process chain
• DNS
• Proxy
• Hardware server
• Business Process Modeling - e.g. Camunda
• Map-Reduce pattern

Badges to highlight flows and statuses.

• Ok badge
• Warning badge
• Error badge