Welcome to the Architecture Corner.
Today we're taking a deep dive into something that can truly
transform how you manage complex systems, the advanced
capabilities of Event Catalog. We've touched on the basics
before, but these features, they offer huge value, especially
when you're dealing with larger, more integrated systems.
Yeah, it's fascinating actually, how these advanced features
tackle the real world messiness of, you know, scaling and
evolving systems. They make your documentation
more than just a record, becomes an active tool guiding
development and frankly, preventing chaos.
Absolutely. So OK, let's unpack this.
Let's see how event catalog helps you level up from just
managing events to really mastering that whole event
driven landscape. Now when your system grows, one
of the biggest headaches is keeping boundaries clear, right?
That's where event catalogs ability to capture sub domains
becomes, well, game changer. And this isn't just some random
grouping. It lets you do soft
segmentation, clearly mark boundaries around services
within a domain. It follows domain have been
designed DDD concepts and crucially this empowers
individual teams. They can evolve their own
services independently. Real domain ownership.
Right. And defining those subdomains is
just vital for clarity, for manageability.
It stops your whole event ecosystem looking like one giant
confusing BLOB. It lets teams own their patch,
iterate, you know, without stepping on everyone else's
toes. OK, but systems are always
changing, aren't they? Stuff evolves, So how do we
manage that? How do we make sure everyone
knows what's current That's not? Good question.
Event Catalog has some key tools for this constant flux
versioning, change logs and deprecating elements.
Ah, OK, tell us about those. So versioning.
It's optional but really powerful for tracking how
services and messages evolve over time.
It means you can keep old versions around, mark them
clearly, you get historical context, smoother transitions,
then change logs. These are pretty essential I'd
say. They capture the what changed
for domain services messages and they could be really rich, you
know even support diff sometimes showing exactly what was
modified. Nice and deprecating.
Right, deprecating elements for things reaching end of life.
It gives you a clear way to flag services, commands, events,
whatever as deprecated. You can even add dates and event
catalog uses clear visual cues like read if the deprecation
dates passed, yellow if it's coming up.
Users see it immediately. OK, so those tools help manage
the individual pieces and their changes.
But what about the bigger picture?
Understanding how everything connects and interacts,
Visualizing the flow? That seems critical too.
Well, Event Catalog helps there with channels.
These capture the actual mechanics.
Then Kafka topics, AWSQSQS, that sort of thing.
They clearly show the links between producers and consumers.
It's like having a live plumbing diagram for your event
architecture. Yeah, exactly.
And if you need to visualize a whole end to end process, one
that crosses multiple services, Flows offered a pretty
interesting way to do that. It's text based, kind of a mix
between say BPMN for business processes and event storming.
It focuses specifically on the services involved and the
messages they exchanged during a process.
And for people like me who love a good diagram, you can embed
tools like Mermaid and plant UML directly in the docs.
That avoids all that manual exporting and uploading.
Pretty neat. Definitely saves a lot of
hassle. But how do you make sure all
this great documentation stays, you know, consistent, complete,
accurate as things keep changing?
Ah yeah, the $1,000,000 question.
That's where governance reports kick in.
They essentially give you a health status for your
documentation based on criteria. Like is it complete as it
follows standards? Is ownership clear?
Is the life cycle managed properly?
And the cool part is you can integrate these reports into
your CI CD pipelines so documentation stops being an
afterthought and becomes like a proactive quality gate right in
your delivery process. Embedding quality checks makes
sense. So with all this potential
documentation, how do bigger organizations manage it all?
Keep it organized. Good point.
Event Catalog supports different deployment strategies.
You could have one central repository, or you could keep
documentation right next to the code in each services repo.
But for really large orgs, Federation is a key advanced
feature. It lets you stitch together
documentation from lots of different repositories into one
single unified view. What's really powerful is how it
handles resolving dependencies across those different
documentation sets across teams seamlessly.
Wow, you have massively speeds up team independence and large
scale integration. Otherwise you're stuck mocking
events locally from other teams, which can be a pain.
OK, this all sounds incredibly powerful, but I can imagine a
smaller team maybe just starting out with EDTA thinking, wow, is
this maybe too much? Too much documentation overhead?
How do you strike that balance? That's a really fair question.
Look, while these features offer immense capability, my advice is
always start small, Test the water, see what value specific
features bring to your context, your needs, the actual syntax
for event catalog. You can pick that up very
quickly. That's probably not going to be
your biggest hurdle. The real challenge is finding
that sweet spot for your team, your organization, using these
tools effectively without, you know, over engineering the whole
thing. Sound advice?
Start small, find the value. And that brings us towards the
end of our deep dive into the advanced capabilities of Event
Catalog. So maybe something to think
about is this, how might embedding those quality checks,
those governance reports directly into your delivery
pipeline instead of relying on manual reviews later, how might
that transform your team's efficiency and maybe even their
confidence when building event driven systems?
Interesting thought. We've been exploring insights
inspired by Mario Bettencourt's work today.
For more detailed information, definitely check out the
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