Vistecture

documentation architecture

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Mar 2022

Assess

Vistecture is a tool for the visualization and analysis of distributed and/or microservice-oriented software architectures of any scale. It can be integrated in a projects CI pipeline for the automated generation of up-to-date documentation.

With projects at DCX reaching a certain threshold of size and complexity, we started struggling with keeping documentation up to date manually, especially with regard to e.g. architecture diagrams or API request/response flows. Thus, we have developed a tool for the rendering of various kinds of documentation and visualizations based on a single architecture description file.

Applications (microservices) and dependencies are defined using a simple, YAML-based syntax. This service definition can then be converted to the desired output formats or browsed in the Vistecture online viewer.