If you’ve used Azure Canvas before, you’ll notice it’s had a rebrand — it’s now ZoneForge for Azure, and it’s moved to zoneforge.cloud. Everything else about it is the same free, in-browser tool; the name is the main thing that’s changed. (azure-canvas.com still redirects, and all your existing share links keep working.)
Why the rename? Microsoft recently shipped a feature called “Azure Canvases”, which started crowding out the tool in search results and causing confusion. Rather than fight Microsoft’s own product for the name — and to keep on the right side of the “Azure” trademark, which asks third-party tools to use a “X for Azure” pattern — I’ve rebranded. “ZoneForge” felt right: the tool is increasingly about defining and forging the zones (subscriptions, regions, resource groups, networks) of an architecture.
It’s grown well beyond a diagram tool. What started as “drag some Azure shapes and generate Bicep” is now closer to a proper Azure-aware architecture designer. Since the original post it’s added:
- Import from Azure — point it at a subscription and pull in an entire resource group (or a single VNet and what’s connected to it) to diagram what you already run.
- Architecture-aware placement — it understands Azure, so resources snap into the right containers: subnets inside VNets, VMs/NSGs inside subnets, gateways/firewalls/bastion in their reserved subnets.
- Validate, Review & Well-Architected score — check the design against a live subscription, plus best-practice review and a WAF pillar score.
- Live cost estimate — real Azure retail pricing straight on the canvas, no sign-in needed.
- Boundaries & views — Management Group / Subscription / Region / Resource Group boundaries, plus separate Network, Infrastructure and Identity views.
- More ways to get the design out — Bicep, ARM JSON and Terraform, plus Visio (.vsdx), SVG, and clean A4 printing.
- Quality of life — a File menu (save/load/import/export), one-click Share links, draggable dialogs, and dark mode.
Under the hood the rename touches everything you’d expect — new domain, updated metadata, new export filenames (zoneforge.bicep, zoneforge.arm.json, etc.) — but it’s deliberately backwards-compatible. Old Azure Canvas JSON exports still import, the #d= share-link format is unchanged, and your saved diagrams survive.
There’s also now a feedback box in the About dialog (a 5-star rating and a comment field) — if you’ve tried it, I’d genuinely love a rating and a line on what worked or what broke. Just click the ‘Z’ in the top right corner.
It’s still free, still runs entirely in your browser, and still at the stage where I want people to poke at it. Give it a go and tell me what you think.
If you work with Azure, try to break it — that’s the most useful feedback there is. 😄