# Flow Architecture Diagram
> Visualize your cloud microservices architecture
Flow is a visual tool that gives you an always up-to-date view of your entire system, helping you reason about your
microservices architecture and identify which services depend on each other and how they work together.
## Birds-eye view
Having access to a zoomed out representation of your system can be invaluable in pretty much all parts of the
development cycle. Flow helps you:
* Track down bottlenecks before they grow into big problems.
* Get new team members onboarded much faster.
* Pinpoint hot paths in your system, services that might need extra attention.
Services and PubSub topics are represented as boxes, arrows indicate a dependency. In the example below
the `login` service has dependencies on the `user` and `authentication` services. Dashed arrows shows publications or
subscriptions to a topic. Here, `payment` publishes to the `payment-made` topic and `email` subscribe to it:
## Highlight dependencies
Hover over a service, or PubSub topic, to instantly reveal the nature and scale of its dependencies.
Here the `login` service and its dependencies are highlighted. We can see that `login` makes queries to the
database and requests to two of the endpoints from the `user` service as well as requests to one endpoint from
the `authentication` service:
## Real-time updates
Flow is accessible in the [Local Development Dashboard](/docs/ts/observability/dev-dash) and the [Encore Cloud dashboard](https://app.encore.cloud) for cloud environments.
When developing locally, Flow will auto update in real-time to reflect your architecture as you
make code changes. This helps you be mindful of important dependencies and makes it clear if you introduce new ones.
For cloud environments, Flow auto-updates with each deploy.
In the example below a new subscription on the topic `payment-made` is introduced and then removed in `user` service:
## Highlight dependencies
Hover over a service, or PubSub topic, to instantly reveal the nature and scale of its dependencies.
Here the `login` service and its dependencies are highlighted. We can see that `login` makes queries to the
database and requests to two of the endpoints from the `user` service as well as requests to one endpoint from
the `authentication` service:
## Real-time updates
Flow is accessible in the [Local Development Dashboard](/docs/ts/observability/dev-dash) and the [Encore Cloud dashboard](https://app.encore.cloud) for cloud environments.
When developing locally, Flow will auto update in real-time to reflect your architecture as you
make code changes. This helps you be mindful of important dependencies and makes it clear if you introduce new ones.
For cloud environments, Flow auto-updates with each deploy.
In the example below a new subscription on the topic `payment-made` is introduced and then removed in `user` service: