As a solutions architect, consultant or engineer working on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) you will surely be faced with situations that require you create spiffy architecture diagrams with standard icon sets. Fortunately you can find a set of icons from Oracle itself in different formats including EPS, PNG, SVG and Visio Stencil.
You can use these icons in any authoring tool that supports embedding them in. These include presentation software like Powerpoint. But if you are looking for a free web based diagramming environment, draw.io is very popular. The advantages you get with using a platform such as draw.io are the capability to build multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud architectures that involve the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure artifacts very easily.
So how do you use the OCI icon set with draw.io? It is really very simple.
- Download the “SVG Graphics” icon set from here.
- Unzip it into any folder.
- Open draw.io and create a new diagram
4. Click on File -> New Library -> Browser.
5. In the dialog box that follows change the name of the library to any text you want. For instance, here I am going to import the Networking icons only, so I call this library OCI Networking.
6. Now just drag and drop the relevant icons into the space within the dialog box. You can drag multiple icons at a time…
…and they will appear as follows. As simple as that! Then click the Save button.
7. The OCI Networking icon set will now appear as a section inside draw.io.
8.You can add as many icons as you want to a library/section. In fact if you had imported all the icons from the OCI Library, your UI would probably look like this. I would recommend you create multiple libraries/sections. You can even export them out and reuse them across libraries.
9. You are now good to go create your diagrams with these icons!
So that is how simple it is to use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure icon sets in draw.io architecture diagrams.
Alternatives
Now, if you want alternatives there are few for different purposes and markets:
- First off, here is something that can generate scripts to actually create the infrastructure on OCI. As of the date of this article, it is a work in progress called the OCI Designer Toolkit. May not be ready yet, but certainly worth keeping an eye out for.
- Or if you want to diagram in code (hmm..), here is something for you.
- And finally something from the commercial side.
- A vendor neutral icon set is here if you need to differentiate those from OCI icons and you don’t want to use other vendors’ icons.
As for me, I am back to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure icon sets and draw.io. Drawing flexibly.
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