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Nested diagram

Hierarchy by containment: scopes, trust zones, policy cascades.

1 nested diagram example

Policy scope cascade

How a company-wide policy narrows through business unit and team down to a single task.

Containment is the grammar: the outer ring is the broadest scope and every inner ring inherits from it. Strokes strengthen inward and only the innermost ring, the decision being made today, gets the accent.

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What is a nested diagram?

A nested diagram shows hierarchy by containment: boxes or circles sit inside larger ones, so each element belongs to the scope that encloses it. It is the visual form of scopes, trust zones and policy cascades.

Read it from the outside in. The outermost shape is the widest scope, such as an organization, and each inner shape inherits its rules, such as a folder or project inside it.

When to use a nested diagram

  • Use it to explain how cloud policies cascade from organization to folder to project to resource.
  • Use it to show network or security zones, where a service lives inside a subnet inside a VPC.
  • If one item belongs to several groups at once, nesting cannot show it, so use a Venn diagram or a graph instead.

How to make a good nested diagram

  1. Limit the depth to about four levels, or the inner boxes become too small to label.
  2. Put each container's label in its top-left corner so it is never hidden by its contents.
  3. Use shading that gets lighter or darker with depth so the levels read without a legend.
  4. Note what is inherited and what is overridden at each level when that is the point of the diagram.