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.
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.
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.