Archium’s ‘Quick Peek’ videos give you a demo of a single feature of Archium in just 2 minutes. and how it can help your team. Watch the Quick Peek about the Flows Directory below:
Flows Directory
Last post I showed you the first half of Archium’s Architecture Directory: the Components Directory, a list of all the Components in our system.
The second half of the Architecture Directory is the Flows Directory: a list of all the Flows that occur in our system. While the Components Directory tells you everything that the system is made of, the Flows Directory tells you everything that the system can do. Here’s a picture of one:
You’ll recognise common use cases in this list like ‘Create Account’, ‘Login’, and ‘Search’.
But, what is a Flow, exactly? Well, let’s have a look at one.
Let’s go to the Publisher Webapp, and show a diagram of the Flow when someone adds a song to a release.
You can see here how this request flows through the system. You see all of the Components that are used,
the API Entrypoints that are hit, and whether messages are synchronous or asynchronous.
If you think about all of the operations that a system has the capability to perform, in Archium, each one of those is a Flow. And the Flows Directory shows you a list of all these operations. That means it’s an excellent place to look, to start to understand what functions your system allows users to perform.
Getting Flows Into Archium
There’s a lot of detail in a Flow, far more than you’d expect any dev team to write up and keep up to date. That’s why Archium generates these Flows for you automatically. It does that by reverse engineering your distributed tracing data into a detailed architecture model.
Increasing the Flows Directory’s Readability
Now, Flows don’t pop out of tracing data with these lovely readable names, but it’s just a 5 second job to open up a new Flow and change its name to something more friendly.
That small investment turns the Flows Directory into a very readable list of system capabilities. It can then be used by anyone in your organisation to start understanding what the system does, from developers, testers, and SREs, right up to the CTO and even across your org to teams like Product and Support.
We hope you enjoyed that quick peek at the Flows Directory feature of the Archium service catalog.
What Next?
Want to see more of Archium’s unique capabilities? Check out our Quick Peek videos playlist on YouTube.
Got questions about what Archium is and how it works? You’ll probably enjoy our Frequently Asked Questions.
Want to try Archium for your team? Get in touch so we can set you up with a free trial.