Proposal: Fabric Visualizer Tool (Architecture & Policy Documentation)

[hassannmoussaa]

Hello Fabric community,

I’ve been thinking about a tool that could really help both new adopters and experienced teams working with Fabric:

Idea

A Fabric Visualizer that takes Fabric configuration (factories, blueprints, modules) and generates:

• Architecture diagrams (projects, networks, GKE, databases, etc.).
• Org policies and IAM rules visualization (who has access, where policies apply).
• Security & networking rules overview (firewalls, service perimeters, etc.).
• Auto-generated documentation that pairs with the diagrams.

Essentially, it would turn Fabric YAML + Terraform configs into a living, visual architecture draft for easier understanding, onboarding, and compliance reviews.

Why This Could Be Valuable

• Helps new users quickly grasp Fabric setups without parsing complex YAML.
• Provides visual documentation for architects/security teams.
• Could be used in code reviews and compliance checks (e.g., visualize before deploying).
• Bridges the gap between infra-as-code and architecture diagrams.

Open Questions

• Should this live inside the Fabric repo (as a supported utility) or in a separate companion repo?
• What’s the best format for diagrams? (Terraform Graph + Graphviz? PlantUML? Custom tooling?)
• Would the community prefer static diagrams (SVG/PNG) or something interactive (web UI)?

Status

I’ve already started experimenting with a prototype that parses configs and produces draft diagrams/documentation. Before going further, I’d love to hear what the community thinks:

Is this useful enough to be part of Fabric? Or seperate repo linked to Fabric also maybe ?!

Should we collaborate here or keep it as a separate community project and link it?

Next Steps

If there’s interest, I can share early prototypes and open a draft repo for contributions.

What do you all think? Would a Fabric Visualizer be helpful to your workflows ?!

[juliocc]

While this tool may be valuable to some, diagramming is not a problem that Fabric is trying to solve. In my experience, diagramming serves as a means to an end during the design process, not the end itself.

As you may have seen from recent pull requests, we are working to decrease our maintenance burden by aggressively removing code from this repository. A tool of this nature would consume our already limited resources and is unlikely to be approved by the other maintainers. You are, of course, welcome to host such a tool in a separate repository.

Thank you for the proposal, but it's a no for me.

[rosmo]

Hey @hassannmoussaa, I've been actually working on a new version of gcpviz, which be of your interest.

[hassannmoussaa]

Hello,

For sure , could we collaborate there ?!