USER MANUAL · MODELING

Zones

Zones are the labelled regions behind nodes — a Kubernetes cluster, a network boundary, a vendor's estate. They are deliberately not structure: a zone never enters the layout engine, the diff, or a flow, and nothing “belongs” to it in the model. Membership is geometric — whatever the rectangle covers is in it — so moving a node in or out of a zone is the whole gesture.

AWS eu-west-1
On-prem — VPN only
Booking PlatformSystem
Event StreamDatastore
Legacy CRMSystem · External
Zones are decorative regions behind the nodes: a boundary you draw once and drag nodes into. The steel variant with the lock marks restricted ground — a VPN, a compliance boundary.

Working with zones

  • Create one with Add group in edit mode; name it and resize it like a node. Its panel offers a custom tint color.
  • Two variants: the golden zone for ownership and environments, and a steel restricted treatment with a lock glyph — use it for gated or compliance-bounded areas (VPN-only, allow-listed IPs, PCI scope).
  • Dragging a zone carries everything inside it — the nodes it covers at the moment you grab it move as one.
  • Zones stretch on their own to keep wrapping members that grow or expand.
  • Zones nest: draw a smaller one inside a bigger one for a boundary within a boundary.
  • Deleting a zone deletes only the rectangle — the nodes it covered stay exactly where they are.
  • Zones can be dragged in view mode too — handy mid-presentation; those moves are yours alone and vanish on reload (view mode never edits the model).

Zone or container?

Reach for a container when the grouping is real structure — it nests, collapses, rolls up health and comments, and shows in the diff. Reach for a zone when the grouping is an overlay on structure — a deployment boundary, a team's slice, a compliance perimeter — that should read on the canvas without changing what anything is.