Creating Wardley Maps using Lambda Functions

One of the biggest limitations that I had when trying to use/create Wardley Maps was my inability to programatically create the maps (ideally via and DSL or something like DOT language).

What I really wanted was to be able to create Maps from an serverless environment, namely from an Lambda Function.

After some research, I was able to find a nice way to do just that  (all the code is available on this GitHub repo https://github.com/pbx-gs/wardley-maps-generator 7)

After playing with a number of scenarios and techniques I zoomed in on the following tech stack:

• AWS API Gateway exposes an url that calls an
• Lambda function, which saves the data supplied (coffeescript) in a file that will be loaded by an HTML page
• the html will load up visjs 1 which is what will render the graph (in the browser)
• start a local python web server, that
• uses pyppeteer to open up a headless version of chrome, and
• opens the page exposed by the web server in the headless browser, and
• takes screenshot of the page, and
• returns png value (to the browser or lambda caller)
• Hugo was also used locally during develpment