Let’s say I had a few microservices in different repositories and they communicated over HTTP using JSON. Some services are triggered directly by other microservices, but others can be triggered by events like a timer going off, a file being dropped into a bucket, a firewall rule blocking X amount of packets and hitting a threshold, etc.

Is there a way to document the microservices together in one holistic view? Maybe, how do you visualise the data, its schema (fields, types, …), and its flow between the microservices?


Bonus (optional) question: Is there a way to handle schema updates? For example generate code from the documentation that triggers a CI build in affected repos to ensure it still works with the updates.

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    fedilink
    12 months ago

    If you don’t mind the runtime overhead OpenTelemetry would do the job (with maybe some sort of manual instrumentation for things like timers) and builds a service map.

    IMO however if your services are closely tied together then how about grouping them together into one or multiple mono-repositories ? Or at least start designing your bounded contexts so that documenting by hand doesn’t become a maintenance burden.