[openstack-dev] [nova][all] Architecture Diagrams in ascii art?

Steve Baker sbaker at redhat.com
Mon May 11 22:22:55 UTC 2015


On 12/05/15 09:57, Joe Gordon wrote:
> When learning about how a project works one of the first things I look 
> for is a brief architecture description along with a diagram. For most 
> OpenStack projects, all I can find is a bunch of random third party 
> slides and diagrams.
>
> Most Individual OpenStack projects have either no architecture diagram 
> or ascii art. Searching for 'OpenStack X architecture' where X is any 
> of the OpenStack projects turns up pretty sad results. For example 
> heat [0] an Keystone [1] have no diagram. Nova on the other hand does 
> have a diagram, but its ascii art [2]. I don't think ascii art makes 
> for great user facing documentation (for any kind of user).
>
> So how can we do better then ascii art architecture diagrams?
>
How about ascii source diagrams?
> [0] http://docs.openstack.org/developer/heat/architecture.html
> [1] http://docs.openstack.org/developer/keystone/architecture.html
> [2] http://docs.openstack.org/developer/nova/devref/architecture.html
>

These are all sphinx generated documents, so we could use something like 
blockdiag to generate all manner of diagrams
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sphinxcontrib-blockdiag
http://blockdiag.com/en/



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