Architecture Diagram Templates | FlowZap

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Architecture Diagram Templates

Explore 50 architecture diagram templates covering Microservices, Event-Driven, CQRS, Serverless, Saga Pattern, Circuit Breaker, Bulkhead, Hexagonal, Clean Architecture, Domain-Driven Design, and more. Each template is a production-ready FlowZap Code diagram you can download as a .fz file and customize in the FlowZap editor.

Microservices

Microservices API Gateway Architecture

A microservices API gateway architecture diagram showing request routing, JWT authentication, rate limiting, service discovery, and response aggregation across distributed backend services. This template models the entry point for all client traffic in a microservices ecosystem, enforcing security policies before requests reach internal services. Ideal for platform engineers designing scalable API infrastructure with centralized cross-cutting concerns.

Nodes: 17Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★★

Microservices Service Mesh Architecture

A service mesh architecture diagram with Istio or Linkerd sidecar proxies handling mTLS encryption, traffic policies, circuit breaking, and distributed tracing across microservices. This template visualizes how a service mesh abstracts networking concerns away from application code, enabling zero-trust communication between services. Essential for teams adopting service mesh infrastructure to improve observability and security.

Nodes: 18Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★★

Microservices Database-Per-Service Architecture

A database-per-service architecture diagram where each microservice owns its dedicated data store, with event-driven synchronization via Kafka for cross-service data consistency. This template demonstrates the core microservices data isolation principle, showing how PostgreSQL and MongoDB coexist in a polyglot persistence strategy. Critical for architects enforcing service autonomy while maintaining eventual consistency.

Nodes: 16Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Microservices Decomposition by Business Capability

A microservices decomposition architecture diagram organized by business capabilities: Identity, Product Catalog, Pricing, and Order Fulfillment, each with independent data stores and APIs. This template shows how to break a monolith into services aligned with business domains, using a Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) pattern for client-specific aggregation. Useful for architects planning domain-driven microservice boundaries.

Nodes: 17Lanes: 5Complexity: ★★★★

Microservices Strangler Fig Migration Architecture

A strangler fig migration architecture diagram showing the incremental replacement of a legacy monolith with new microservices, using a routing layer to split traffic between old and new systems. This template models the proven migration strategy where new features are built as microservices while legacy endpoints are gradually retired. Essential for teams modernizing legacy systems without risky big-bang rewrites.

Nodes: 16Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Microservices Service Discovery Architecture

A service discovery architecture diagram with Consul or Eureka registry, client-side load balancing, health check heartbeats, and automatic instance registration and deregistration. This template visualizes how microservices dynamically locate each other without hardcoded endpoints, enabling elastic scaling and self-healing infrastructure. Key for platform teams building resilient service-to-service communication.

Nodes: 16Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★

Microservices Sidecar Pattern Architecture

A sidecar pattern architecture diagram showing Envoy proxy, log collector, and config watcher sidecars running alongside application containers in a Kubernetes pod, with a control plane managing configuration. This template demonstrates how auxiliary concerns like logging, monitoring, and configuration are deployed as co-located containers. Foundational for teams adopting cloud-native container orchestration patterns.

Nodes: 13Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★★

Microservices Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) Architecture

A Backend-for-Frontend architecture diagram with separate BFF layers for web and mobile clients, each optimizing API responses for their specific platform while sharing common backend microservices. This template shows how to avoid one-size-fits-all APIs by tailoring data aggregation and payload optimization per client type. Recommended for teams serving multiple frontend platforms from a shared microservices backend.

Nodes: 12Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★

Event-Driven

Event-Driven Publish-Subscribe Architecture

An event-driven publish-subscribe architecture diagram with Kafka or RabbitMQ message broker, event serialization, topic partitioning, fan-out delivery to multiple consumers, and dead letter queue error handling. This template models the foundational async messaging pattern where producers and consumers are fully decoupled through a message broker. Essential for architects building loosely coupled, scalable event-driven systems.

Nodes: 17Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★★

Event-Driven Event Sourcing Architecture

An event sourcing architecture diagram where all state changes are stored as an immutable sequence of domain events, with read projections built from the event stream and snapshot optimization for fast aggregate loading. This template shows how event sourcing eliminates data loss by preserving the complete history of every state transition. Critical for systems requiring full audit trails, temporal queries, and event replay capabilities.

Nodes: 18Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Event-Driven CQRS with Event Store Architecture

A CQRS architecture diagram combining separate command and query APIs with an event bus for asynchronous read model synchronization, including projectors that build denormalized views from domain events. This template demonstrates the full CQRS+ES stack where writes go through domain validation and reads are served from optimized materialized views. Ideal for high-throughput systems where read and write workloads have fundamentally different scaling requirements.

Nodes: 18Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Event-Driven Choreography Architecture

An event-driven choreography architecture diagram where microservices coordinate through events without a central orchestrator, with Order, Payment, Inventory, and Shipping services reacting to each other's domain events. This template models the decentralized coordination pattern where each service knows only its own responsibilities and publishes events for others to consume. Best for teams favoring autonomous services over centralized workflow control.

Nodes: 19Lanes: 5Complexity: ★★★★

Event-Driven Streaming Pipeline Architecture

A real-time event streaming pipeline architecture diagram with IoT sensors, application logs, and clickstream data flowing through Kafka into Apache Flink for window aggregation, anomaly detection, and multi-sink output to data lakes and dashboards. This template visualizes end-to-end stream processing from ingestion through transformation to storage and alerting. Essential for data engineers building real-time analytics and monitoring platforms.

Nodes: 18Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Event-Driven Domain Events Architecture

A domain events architecture diagram showing how aggregate roots raise domain events that are dispatched both in-process to local handlers and cross-boundary to integration event consumers in other bounded contexts. This template models the DDD event pattern where domain logic triggers side effects through a clean event dispatcher, maintaining separation between domain and infrastructure concerns. Key for teams implementing Domain-Driven Design with event-based integration.

Nodes: 17Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Event-Driven CDC (Change Data Capture) Architecture

A Change Data Capture architecture diagram using Debezium to tail database transaction logs and publish change events to Kafka, feeding downstream consumers that update search indexes, invalidate caches, load data warehouses, and write audit logs. This template shows how CDC eliminates dual-write problems by capturing changes at the database level without modifying application code. Critical for data synchronization across heterogeneous systems.

Nodes: 17Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Event-Driven Dead Letter Queue Architecture

A dead letter queue architecture diagram with retry policies, exponential backoff, max retry thresholds, DLQ routing for failed messages, operations alerting, and manual reprocessing workflows. This template models the critical error handling pattern for asynchronous messaging systems, ensuring no message is silently lost when processing fails. Essential for building reliable event-driven systems with proper failure recovery mechanisms.

Nodes: 16Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★

Event-Driven Notification Hub Architecture

An event-driven notification hub architecture diagram with multi-source event ingestion, template-based message rendering, user preference routing across email (SendGrid/SES), push (FCM), SMS (Twilio), and Slack channels, with delivery tracking and retry mechanisms. This template models a centralized notification system that decouples business services from delivery infrastructure, supporting multi-channel communication with user-controlled preferences. Ideal for platform teams building scalable notification infrastructure.

Nodes: 20Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★★

CQRS

CQRS Read-Write Separation Architecture

A CQRS read-write separation architecture diagram with dedicated command and query paths, PostgreSQL for writes, Redis or Elasticsearch for optimized reads, and an event-driven synchronization layer with lag monitoring. This template demonstrates the core CQRS principle of separating read and write models to independently scale and optimize each path. Ideal for applications with asymmetric read/write ratios where query performance is critical.

Nodes: 18Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

CQRS Materialized View Architecture

A CQRS materialized view architecture diagram with multiple projectors building purpose-specific read models: order summaries, customer dashboards, analytics cubes, and search indexes, all fed from a single event stream. This template shows how to create multiple optimized query views from the same write events, each tailored to a specific use case with sub-millisecond read latency. Perfect for systems requiring diverse query patterns from a single data source.

Nodes: 18Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

CQRS Task-Based UI Architecture

A CQRS task-based UI architecture diagram where the frontend captures user intent as explicit commands, submits them asynchronously with optimistic updates, and receives real-time confirmations via WebSocket when the read model is synchronized. This template models the modern UI pattern that replaces CRUD forms with intent-driven commands, enabling responsive user experiences with eventual consistency. Recommended for teams building reactive frontends on CQRS backends.

Nodes: 19Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Serverless

Serverless API Backend Architecture

A serverless API backend architecture diagram with API Gateway, Lambda authorizer functions, business logic functions, and managed cloud services including DynamoDB, S3, SQS, and SNS for a fully managed, auto-scaling backend. This template models the serverless-first approach where infrastructure management is eliminated entirely, with pay-per-invocation pricing and automatic scaling to zero. Essential for startups and teams building cost-efficient, event-driven API backends.

Nodes: 15Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★

Serverless Event Processing Architecture

A serverless event processing architecture diagram with S3, DynamoDB Streams, API Gateway, and CloudWatch triggers invoking Lambda functions, orchestrated by Step Functions with fan-out via SQS and dead letter queue error handling. This template shows how to build complex event processing pipelines entirely from managed serverless components, with no servers to provision or manage. Ideal for data processing workflows that need elastic scaling and built-in fault tolerance.

Nodes: 17Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Serverless Step Functions Orchestration Architecture

An AWS Step Functions orchestration architecture diagram with state machine workflows including choice states, parallel processing, wait-for-callback patterns, and compensation rollback for failed steps. This template models serverless workflow orchestration where complex multi-step processes are defined as state machines with built-in error handling and retry logic. Critical for teams building reliable serverless workflows that require human approval or long-running processes.

Nodes: 17Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★★

Serverless Edge Computing Architecture

A serverless edge computing architecture diagram with CloudFront or Cloudflare edge locations, Lambda@Edge functions for A/B testing and geo-personalization, origin shield request collapsing, and cache-first response strategies. This template visualizes how computation moves to the network edge for ultra-low latency responses, with edge functions modifying requests and responses before they reach the origin. Essential for performance-critical applications serving global audiences.

Nodes: 15Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★

Serverless Data Pipeline Architecture

A serverless data pipeline architecture diagram with Kinesis ingestion, Lambda transformation functions, S3 data lake storage zones (raw and curated), Glue catalog registration, and Athena query engine feeding QuickSight dashboards and SageMaker ML models. This template models a complete serverless ETL pipeline from data ingestion through transformation, cataloging, and analytics without managing any infrastructure. Ideal for data teams building cost-effective analytics platforms.

Nodes: 17Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Serverless Multi-Cloud Architecture

A multi-cloud serverless architecture diagram with DNS-based traffic routing between AWS and Azure regions, automatic failover on health check failures, and bi-directional data replication with conflict resolution across cloud providers. This template models the multi-cloud strategy for maximum availability and vendor independence, using serverless services from both AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB) and Azure (Functions, Cosmos DB). Critical for enterprises requiring cloud provider redundancy.

Nodes: 18Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Saga Pattern

Saga Orchestration Pattern Architecture

A saga orchestration architecture diagram with a central orchestrator coordinating multi-step distributed transactions across Order, Inventory, and Payment services, with a dedicated compensation chain for rollback on failure. This template models the orchestration-based saga pattern where a single coordinator manages the transaction lifecycle and triggers compensating actions when any step fails. Essential for architects implementing reliable distributed transactions without two-phase commit.

Nodes: 19Lanes: 5Complexity: ★★★★

Saga Choreography Pattern Architecture

A saga choreography architecture diagram where Order, Payment, and Inventory services coordinate through domain events without a central orchestrator, with each service publishing and subscribing to events that drive the transaction forward or trigger compensation. This template models the decentralized saga approach where services autonomously react to events, reducing single points of failure at the cost of increased complexity in tracking saga state. Best for teams preferring service autonomy over centralized control.

Nodes: 18Lanes: 5Complexity: ★★★★

Saga Distributed Transaction Architecture

A distributed transaction architecture diagram implementing the two-phase commit protocol with a transaction coordinator sending prepare and commit messages to participating services, with global abort on any vote failure. This template visualizes the classic 2PC protocol used when strong consistency is required across multiple services, showing the prepare, vote, and commit/abort phases. Important for understanding distributed consensus trade-offs in microservices architectures.

Nodes: 17Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Saga Travel Booking Architecture

A travel booking saga architecture diagram orchestrating flight, hotel, and car rental reservations as a single distributed transaction, with automatic compensation to cancel all bookings if any reservation step fails. This template models the classic saga use case where multiple independent services must either all succeed or all roll back, ensuring travelers never end up with partial bookings. Perfect for demonstrating saga patterns with a real-world business scenario.

Nodes: 17Lanes: 5Complexity: ★★★★

Saga Order Fulfillment Architecture

An order fulfillment saga architecture diagram with four sequential steps: customer verification, inventory reservation, payment authorization, and shipment creation, with a compensation chain that reverses completed steps on failure. This template models the end-to-end order lifecycle as a saga, showing how each service participates in the transaction and how compensating actions maintain data consistency. Ideal for e-commerce architects designing reliable order processing pipelines.

Nodes: 18Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★★

Resilience

Circuit Breaker Resilience Architecture

A circuit breaker resilience architecture diagram showing the complete state machine with closed, open, and half-open states, failure threshold tracking, recovery timer, and fallback response strategies for protecting services from cascading failures. This template visualizes the circuit breaker pattern in detail, including how the breaker transitions between states based on success and failure counts. Essential for building fault-tolerant microservices that degrade gracefully under load.

Nodes: 18Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★★

Bulkhead Isolation Architecture

A bulkhead isolation architecture diagram with separate thread pools for critical, standard, and batch workloads, each with independent connection pools, exhaustion detection, and backpressure strategies to prevent one workload from starving others. This template models the bulkhead pattern inspired by ship hull compartments, where resource isolation ensures that a failure or overload in one component cannot cascade to others. Critical for systems requiring guaranteed availability for high-priority operations.

Nodes: 18Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Retry with Exponential Backoff Architecture

A retry with exponential backoff architecture diagram showing the complete retry policy engine with retryable vs non-retryable error classification, exponential delay calculation with jitter, max retry thresholds, and graceful exhaustion handling. This template models the essential resilience pattern for handling transient failures in distributed systems, preventing thundering herd problems through randomized backoff delays. Foundational for any service-to-service communication in cloud architectures.

Nodes: 17Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★

Rate Limiter Architecture

A rate limiter architecture diagram implementing the token bucket algorithm with Redis-backed distributed counters, sliding window logs, API key identification, rate limit headers, and multi-node synchronization for consistent enforcement. This template shows how to protect APIs from abuse and ensure fair usage across clients, with proper HTTP 429 responses and Retry-After headers. Essential for API platform teams building production-grade rate limiting infrastructure.

Nodes: 17Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★

Health Check Pattern Architecture

A health check pattern architecture diagram with load balancer probes, deep health checks verifying database, cache, disk, and dependency status, automatic instance rotation, and alerting integration with PagerDuty for consecutive failures. This template models the health monitoring infrastructure that enables self-healing systems, where unhealthy instances are automatically removed from rotation and operations teams are alerted. Key for building production-ready services with proper observability.

Nodes: 19Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★

Design Patterns

Hexagonal (Ports and Adapters) Architecture

A hexagonal architecture diagram showing the clean separation between domain core, inbound adapters (REST, GraphQL, CLI, message consumers), outbound adapters (PostgreSQL, Stripe, email, Redis), and the port interfaces that connect them. This template visualizes the ports and adapters pattern where the domain core has zero dependencies on infrastructure, making it fully testable and technology-agnostic. Foundational for teams adopting clean architecture principles in their codebase.

Nodes: 16Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Clean Architecture Layers

A clean architecture layers diagram showing the four concentric layers: Entities (domain), Use Cases (application), Interface Adapters (controllers, presenters, repositories), and Frameworks & Drivers (web server, database, cloud SDK). This template models Uncle Bob's Clean Architecture with the dependency rule where inner layers never depend on outer layers, ensuring the domain model remains pure and framework-independent. Essential reference for software architects enforcing architectural boundaries.

Nodes: 16Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★

Domain-Driven Design Bounded Contexts Architecture

A DDD bounded contexts architecture diagram with Order, Customer, Shipping, and Billing contexts connected through an anti-corruption layer, shared kernel, and context map defining integration relationships. This template visualizes the strategic DDD patterns for decomposing complex domains into autonomous bounded contexts that communicate through well-defined integration events. Critical for architects applying Domain-Driven Design to large-scale enterprise systems.

Nodes: 18Lanes: 5Complexity: ★★★★

API Composition Pattern Architecture

An API composition architecture diagram with a composer service that fans out parallel requests to multiple microservices, collects responses with timeout handling, and merges results into a single unified response with partial fallback support. This template models the API composition pattern used when a single client query requires data from multiple services, avoiding the need for direct service-to-service calls. Useful for teams building aggregation layers in microservices architectures.

Nodes: 16Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★

Outbox Pattern for Reliable Messaging Architecture

A transactional outbox architecture diagram where domain writes and event publishing happen in the same database transaction, with a relay process polling the outbox table and publishing events to a message broker with guaranteed delivery. This template solves the dual-write problem where updating a database and publishing an event are not atomic, ensuring exactly-once event delivery without distributed transactions. Critical for event-driven architectures requiring reliable message publishing.

Nodes: 18Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Ambassador Pattern Architecture

An ambassador pattern architecture diagram with a local proxy sidecar handling authentication header injection, circuit breaking, retry logic, and metrics collection for outbound requests to external third-party APIs. This template models the ambassador pattern where a helper service running alongside the application offloads cross-cutting concerns for external communication. Useful for teams integrating with unreliable third-party services that need resilience wrappers.

Nodes: 15Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★

Advanced

GraphQL Federation Architecture

A GraphQL federation architecture diagram with an Apollo Gateway building query plans and fanning out to User, Product, and Review subgraphs, each owning its schema and database, with response stitching into a unified GraphQL result. This template models the federated GraphQL approach where multiple teams independently develop and deploy their subgraphs while clients see a single unified API. Ideal for organizations scaling GraphQL across multiple teams and services.

Nodes: 15Lanes: 3Complexity: ★★★

Zero Trust Security Architecture

A zero trust security architecture diagram with device posture checks, MFA identity verification, risk-based policy decisions, short-lived JWT tokens, micro-segmentation, mTLS encryption, least-privilege access enforcement, and continuous monitoring. This template models the 'never trust, always verify' security paradigm where every request is authenticated and authorized regardless of network location. Essential for security architects implementing modern zero-trust frameworks in cloud-native environments.

Nodes: 19Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Multi-Tenant SaaS Architecture

A multi-tenant SaaS architecture diagram with tenant identification, tier-based routing (shared vs dedicated pools), row-level security, per-tenant encryption keys, and isolated backup strategies for standard and enterprise isolation models. This template models the architecture decisions for building SaaS platforms that serve multiple customers from shared infrastructure while maintaining strict data isolation. Critical for SaaS architects balancing cost efficiency with enterprise security requirements.

Nodes: 17Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Kubernetes Container Orchestration Architecture

A Kubernetes container orchestration architecture diagram showing the control plane (API Server, etcd, Scheduler, Controller Manager), worker nodes (Kubelet, container runtime, kube-proxy, pods), networking layer (Ingress, Network Policy, Service Mesh), and persistent storage with CSI drivers. This template provides a comprehensive view of the Kubernetes architecture stack from control plane to storage layer. Foundational reference for DevOps engineers and platform teams managing Kubernetes clusters.

Nodes: 18Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Data Mesh Architecture

A data mesh architecture diagram with domain-oriented data ownership across Sales, Marketing, and Finance domains, each exposing self-serve data products through APIs with quality SLAs, governed by a federated data platform with a shared catalog and cross-domain query engine. This template models the paradigm shift from centralized data teams to domain-owned data products, applying microservices principles to data architecture. Essential for organizations scaling data operations beyond centralized data warehouse bottlenecks.

Nodes: 17Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Cell-Based Architecture

A cell-based architecture diagram with geographic routing to independent, self-contained cells (US-East, EU-West), each with its own gateway, compute, database, cache, and message queue, plus shared services for cross-cell replication and global configuration. This template models the cell architecture pattern used by hyperscale systems to achieve blast radius isolation, where failures in one cell cannot affect users in another. Key for architects designing systems that require extreme availability and fault isolation.

Nodes: 20Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

Observability Three Pillars Architecture

An observability architecture diagram implementing the three pillars (metrics, traces, logs) with OpenTelemetry SDK instrumentation, OTLP collector pipeline, Prometheus, Jaeger, and Loki backends, Grafana dashboards, SLO/SLI tracking, and PagerDuty alerting integration. This template provides a complete observability stack reference showing how telemetry data flows from application instrumentation through collection, storage, visualization, and incident response. Essential for SRE teams building production monitoring infrastructure.

Nodes: 17Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

GitOps Deployment Architecture

A GitOps deployment architecture diagram with developer Git workflow, CI/CD pipeline building and pushing container images, ArgoCD or Flux detecting Git manifest changes, drift detection, automatic cluster synchronization, and rolling update deployment to Kubernetes. This template models the GitOps paradigm where Git is the single source of truth for both application code and infrastructure state, enabling declarative, auditable, and reproducible deployments. Critical for teams adopting GitOps practices for Kubernetes deployments.

Nodes: 19Lanes: 4Complexity: ★★★★

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