AWS Architecture Icons On Demand
No more searching through hundreds of slides or files for AWS icons
Do you ever find yourself needing to quickly put together a simple AWS architecture diagram in a document or slide deck and then curse the amount of time it takes? There is a better way.
You probably start with a Google image search but find that to be a fairly haphazard approach and can’t quite find the right icon versions. Then, you decide to be smart and search for the official source of icons from AWS. Now you find the official AWS Architecture Icons site and then download between 12 and 50MB of data depending on what format you choose.
This is not trivial as there are 222 pages of PowerPoint slides, or if you use one of the raw files (PNG, SVG, EPS), then there are over 1500 files to wade through.
Next step is to unzip the files and browse through the files until you find the icon you are looking for. This is not trivial as there are 222 pages of PowerPoint slides, or if you use one of the raw files (PNG, SVG, EPS), then there are over 1500 files to wade through. That was fun. Now do it again for each icon you need.
Of course, one excellent solution is to use one of the various diagraming tools that already have AWS icons built in. I often go this route, but there are times when these tools are not an ideal match. Notably, if you’ve ever given an AWS talk (e.g., re:Invent or a Summit), you’ll recall that there is a very specific style guide that is not particularly well suited to using these drawing tools. In these cases, I just want to quickly grab a handful of icons, drop them to my slide, and move on. I really just want a quick way to look up icons on demand.
Click on the icon, it will download instantly. You’re done!
This is exactly what Cloud Pegboard has now added. As always, you can easily search for a service to get a datasheet for all of the service’s information — standard Cloud Pegboard functionality. The enhancement is that the datasheet for each service now includes the icons for that service. Six icons are displayed giving you choices of SVG v. PNG, and each has a choice of primary, light background, and dark background versions. If you click on the icon, it will download instantly. You’re done! You can now drag these icons into whatever document you need.
Sure, this is not rocket science, but the simplicity and time savings are surprisingly delightful. Cloud Pegboard datasheets already are already a great accelerator for giving you quick access to the wide variety of per-service information that you need for efficient development. Cloud Pegboard continually adds new data types to each service, and icons are just the latest enhancement to help improve your efficiency and relieve the information overload stress that comes from the expanse of AWS services. You can check it out at cloudpegboard.com.
About Cloud Pegboard
Cloud Pegboard helps AWS practitioners be highly effective and efficient even in the face of the tremendous complexity and rate of change of AWS services. We want to keep AWS fun and feel more like dancing in a sprinkler on a hot summer day and less like being blasted with a firehose. We make the AWS information you need amazingly easy to access, and with personalization features, we help you stay up to date on the AWS services and capabilities that are important to you and your specific projects.
