faasdiagramil

Faasdiagramil is a term used to describe a notation and accompanying tooling designed to diagram Function as a Service (FaaS) architectures. It emphasizes representing functions, their triggers, inputs and outputs, and the flow of data across a serverless application. Diagrams produced with faasdiagramil aim to be readable by developers and operators and to serve as documentation for design decisions, security boundaries, and operational workflows.

The concept emerged as serverless computing gained traction in the mid-2010s and matured with the growth of event-driven patterns. Teams sought a vendor-agnostic way to describe complex pipelines, function orchestration, and cross-service interactions without relying on provider dashboards. Over time, faasdiagramil has been implemented as both a domain-specific language and a set of rendering templates that integrate with documentation pipelines and CI/CD workflows.

Faasdiagramil notation typically uses nodes to represent functions, edges to show data or event flows, and symbols to indicate triggers such as HTTP requests, queue messages, or pub/sub events. It supports common patterns like fan-out and fan-in, stepwise orchestration, and stateless function composition, with optional annotations for latency, retries, timeouts, and concurrency. Renderers can target multiple backends, including Mermaid and PlantUML, producing SVGs or PNGs for inclusion in documents.

Applications include architecture diagrams for onboarding, incident runbooks, and design reviews. The approach helps clarify ownership, security boundaries, and observability points, and it facilitates communication between developers, operators, and business stakeholders. It also supports versioned diagrams that evolve with the system.

See also: Function as a Service, serverless architecture, diagram as code, Mermaid, PlantUML.