System & Software Architecture Templates
Editable system and software architecture diagram templates — microservices, serverless, event-driven, API gateways, and more. Start from a proven blueprint and adapt it to your stack.
7 templates
Microservices Architecture Diagram
Map independent services, an API gateway, databases and a message bus in a microservices system
Serverless Architecture Template
Map API Gateway, Lambda functions, managed databases and event triggers in a serverless app
Event-Driven Architecture Diagram
Visualize producers, an event broker, consumers and event stores in an async system
API Gateway Architecture Diagram
Show how an API gateway routes, authenticates and rate-limits traffic to backend services
CDN Architecture Diagram
Map edge servers, origin, caching and DNS routing in a content delivery network
Three-Tier Web Application Architecture Diagram
Show presentation, application and data tiers with load balancer and database layers
Kubernetes Cluster Architecture Diagram
Lay out the control plane, worker nodes, pods and core components in a K8s cluster
About architecture diagrams
An architecture diagram shows how the parts of a system fit together: clients, gateways, services, queues, databases and the paths between them. Teams draw them for design reviews, onboarding, incident retrospectives and migration plans, whenever prose alone cannot show what depends on what.
Backend engineers, solution architects, platform teams and technical founders draw most of them, but the audience varies. A security review needs trust boundaries and data stores. A new hire needs request paths and service ownership. An investor deck needs five boxes, not fifty.
A good architecture diagram stays at one level of abstraction, the way the C4 model separates context, container and component views. It names real technologies, such as Postgres, Kafka or Redis, instead of generic boxes. It makes synchronous calls and asynchronous events easy to tell apart, and it marks what sits outside your control, such as third-party APIs and managed services. Start from the closest template and rename the nodes to match your stack. Export a PNG or SVG for docs, or an animated GIF or MP4 for a presentation.
Which template should you pick?
- Pick Microservices Architecture Diagram when independently deployed services, such as auth and payments, sit behind one API gateway alongside a database, cache and CDN.
- Pick Event-Driven Architecture Diagram when services communicate through a broker such as Kafka, with producers, consumers, a schema registry and a dead letter queue.
- Pick Serverless Architecture Template when the app runs on managed functions, edge functions and hosted services, with no servers of your own to draw.
- Pick Three-Tier Web Application Architecture Diagram when explaining a classic web app: frontend, load balancer, app servers, primary database and read replica.
- Pick API Gateway Architecture Diagram, CDN Architecture Diagram or Kubernetes Cluster Architecture Diagram when the topic is one infrastructure layer rather than the whole application.
Or generate one from a prompt
- “Microservices architecture for a food delivery app: API gateway, auth, orders, payments and courier services, Postgres per service, Kafka events, Redis cache.”
- “Serverless image upload pipeline: an S3 upload triggers a Lambda function that resizes images, writes metadata to DynamoDB and notifies users through SNS.”
- “Three-tier architecture for a SaaS dashboard: React frontend, load balancer, two Node.js app servers, Postgres primary with a read replica, and Redis cache.”
Paste any of these into the AI diagram generator to get an editable, animated diagram in seconds.
Tips for customizing architecture templates
- Put the component every request passes through, such as the gateway, broker or load balancer, in the center node, since every other node connects to it.
- Write the protocol into the label, for example Orders Service (gRPC) or Billing Events (async), so readers can tell calls from events.
- Swap generic icons for real vendor logos with the icon search, so the diagram matches the stack your team actually runs.
- Mark what you do not operate, such as third-party APIs, the CDN or a managed database, by adding (external) or (managed) to its label.
- Starting from a whiteboard sketch? Upload a photo of it, and Infogiph generates an editable diagram you can refine by chatting.
Learn more: Best AI diagram generators compared