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.
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.
You do this all manually?
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.
Generate code from documentation
Let me stop you right there. If you want to generate API bindings, those should be generated from code, along with the documentation, not through it.
