Design Beaver validates your architecture as you draw it — catching missing queues, invalid connections, and security anti-patterns before they reach production.
Live in beta · Free · Your diagrams saved to your account
Lambda → RDS
Bursty concurrency can exhaust max_connections. Put RDS Proxy in front to pool connections.
Design Beaver is an AWS architecture canvas with a model of AWS underneath it. It knows what each service is, which connections are legal between them, and which combinations are known to fail in production.
So drawing an arrow isn’t just drawing an arrow. Every connection you make is checked as you make it — against 43 modelled services and their real connection rules — and anything that won’t hold up gets flagged on the canvas while you’re still designing.
Validation
A generic canvas treats every line as equally valid, because it has no model of AWS underneath the icons. Design Beaver checks each connection the moment you make it.
Missing component
An SQS queue triggering Lambda with no dead-letter queue. Messages the consumer keeps failing to process are retried until they expire — then they're gone, silently.
Invalid connection
Lambda wired straight to RDS. Bursty concurrency opens more connections than the database accepts, exhausting max_connections under exactly the traffic you built for.
Security anti-pattern
An RDS instance in a public subnet. The diagram looks identical to the private one — the difference only shows up when a security group lets traffic through.
Anywhere
Design Beaver runs in any browser — phone included. Not a read-only viewer: the same canvas, the same validator. Pull an architecture up in standup, wire two services together, and it still tells you the Lambda can’t reach that database.
No hairline handles to catch with a fingertip. Tap Connect, tap the two services, done — and the connection is checked the same instant it would be on a laptop.
The live issue count sits in the top bar. Tap it for the whole list — each one jumps the canvas straight to the block it’s complaining about.
Drop a comment on the exact service, so whoever opens the diagram next lands on the problem instead of hunting for what you meant.
Building a forty-service architecture from scratch is still a big-screen job. Reviewing one, catching a mistake and flagging it isn’t.
Each one carries its real connection rules, IAM actions, and anti-patterns — the data the validator actually checks against as you draw.
Pricing
The validation engine — the part that catches broken architecture — is free, and stays free. Pro is for turning a checked diagram into infrastructure, and into a budget.
$0
Free forever — not a trial
Coming soon
Pricing announced at launch.
Design Beaver told you to spread instances across Availability Zones, then gave you no way to draw one. v2 adds the AZ layer, Auto Scaling groups, a diagram-wide Problems panel, and accounts that keep your work.
Cloudcraft knows AWS and even prices your architecture. It'll also happily price one that doesn't work. Here's the honest correctness-vs-cost comparison.
draw.io is the best free general-purpose diagramming tool there is. For AWS specifically, that generality is the ceiling. An honest comparison.
Free while in beta. Sign in with Google or GitHub and your diagrams are saved to your account.
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