Every team has that one architecture diagram. It was beautiful the day someone made it, and wrong about a week later. A service moved, a cache appeared, a queue got added, and nobody wanted to open the drawing tool and nudge boxes around again.
So the diagram quietly rots, and new engineers learn the system by reading YAML instead. The good news: that same YAML is more than enough to draw the picture for you. LetDraw reads your Compose or Kubernetes file and lays out the architecture, so the diagram comes from the source of truth instead of drifting away from it.
The ten-second version
Open the Generate from Code dialog, paste your file, and you get a laid-out diagram made of real, editable shapes. No dragging boxes, no manually connecting arrows. Here is a Compose file most people will recognise:
services: web: image: nginx depends_on: [api] api: image: app:latest depends_on: [db, redis] db: image: postgres:16 redis: image: redis:7
Paste that in, and LetDraw turns it into this:
The database became a cylinder, the cache picked up its own icon, and the depends_on edges turned into arrows that route around your boxes instead of through them. It is a diagram, not a screenshot of a config.
What it is actually doing
The dialog does three things worth calling out:
- Auto-detects the format. You do not pick "Compose" or "Kubernetes" from a menu. Paste it and LetDraw recognises what it is.
- Clusters related pieces. Kubernetes manifests are grouped so the layout mirrors your namespaces, not one flat soup of nodes.
- Stamps the right icons. Services, databases and queues get recognisable product icons, so the diagram reads at a glance.
The diagram now comes from the source of truth, so it is right by construction, not by discipline.
It is not just Compose
The same dialog takes a lot more than one format, which is the point. If it describes infrastructure or a system, it probably draws:
- Kubernetes manifests, grouped by namespace
- Terraform and Helm for infra and releases
- Graphviz DOT, SQL DDL, an OpenAPI spec, or even a git log
- Mermaid and D2, if you already keep diagrams as code
Then make it yours
Auto-layout gets you 90 percent of the way, and the last 10 percent is where the value is. Because the result is real shapes, you can:
- Nudge a box, add a note, or highlight the risky path
- Group the parts that belong to one team or one bounded context
- Export to PNG, SVG or PDF for a doc, or copy straight to the clipboard
- Turn the drawing back into Mermaid or D2 when you want code again
And if you want that picture living in your docs, drop an embed snippet into a README or wiki and it stays a live, read-only view. No more stale PNG that someone has to remember to re-export.
Why this matters for DevOps
Architecture diagrams are supposed to be a shared mental model. The moment they lag behind reality, they become a trap: they teach new people the wrong thing and give reviewers false confidence. Generating them from the files you already maintain closes that gap. The diagram is cheap to make, so it is cheap to keep current, and a current diagram is the only kind worth having.
Paste your docker-compose.yml and see your stack draw itself. It takes about as long as reading this sentence.