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How do you holistically document microservices in a multi-repo setup? (programming.dev)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Diagrams. Loads and loads of diagrams. One for each use-case.

Then I'd have one diagram to draw out dependencies between each service at the broadest level. Although depending on how messy your architecture is it can be very difficult to read, in my experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

You do this all manually?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

More or less. Either Excalidraw for your quick and dirty diagrams or I've used PlantUML + C4 Plug-in for your larger, more long lived diagrams with some success.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I just gave PlantUML + the C4 Plugin a try and generally liked it, thank you for the rec!

It seems like a good tool although it inherits all the joys and pains of automatic graph layout.

I think I’ll keep it in my arsenal for detailed diagrams that can handle being a little aesthetically wonky.

I hadn’t heard of C4 before and it seems like a solid idea.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I manually redraw my service architecture because I can create higher quality documentation than when trying to auto-generate it.

But you can get a baseline depending on which Cloud you use. For example, in AWS you can use workload discovery - that generates a system overview.

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.

Yes, for example, if your build server exposes the API with an OpenAPI scheme, you can use the build server to generate a client library like a nuget or npn.

Then in the API consumer you can add a build step that checks if there are new version of the client library. Or setup dependabot that creates PRs to update those dependencies