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Efrain Garay
Efrain Garay

Posted on Originally published at efraingaray.com

Your architecture diagram is lying: I tested both ways of writing it as code

Most architecture diagrams in production are out of date — not through carelessness, but because they live in a PNG someone drew once while the code kept changing. Nobody opens a visual editor to move a box when they ship a microservice at 11pm.

A closed C4 web editor made the rounds on Habr this week: no repo, nothing to self-host, nothing to measure. So I tested the two alternatives you can run yourself, on a real system.

  • Structurizr CLI — generates all three C4 levels (context, containers, components) in 1 second from a single .dsl file.
  • C4-PlantUML — reaches the same result with nothing to install, at the cost of tripling the size of the model you maintain.

The full write-up has the exact commands, the four review gates this unlocks (diff, PR review, versioning, CI), the side-by-side of both tools, and when I'd pick each.

Read the full measurements → https://efraingaray.com/en/blog/arquitectura-como-codigo/

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