Visualize and communicate event definitions, payload schemas and service dependencies — ⚡ Tl;dr EventCatalog is an open-source project created by David Boyne for easily documenting and discovering services and events in an event-driven architecture. EventCatalog includes a simple web interface that can be statically generated for anyone on your team to search, filter and visualize services, events and dependencies.

Create custom RSS feeds with release notes for your cloud stack — ⚡ Tl;dr StackFeed.io saves AWS, GCP and Azure services in your cloud stack and provides a custom-tailored news feed of release notes and important updates. Receive real-time messages for your service updates directly to your Slack or Teams channel with a tailored RSS feed. 🚀 Let’s kick-off We’re excited to tell you about the motivation…

An industry standard for defining asynchronous APIs for event-driven architecture — ⚡ Tl;dr AsyncAPI is a standard for describing the communication between services and applications for asynchronous event-driven architectures (EDA). AsyncAPI specs allow you to easily generate data models, client libraries, server code and documentation in various languages to speed up the development process. 🚀 Let’s kick-off

ADRs document architecturally significant decisions made over time — ⚡ Tl;dr Architecture decision records (ADRs) are short text descriptions documenting architecturally significant decisions during the software development lifecycle. They capture high-level decisions that may not always be obvious from code or infrastructure. ADRs include important context for each decision, such as reasoning, consequences and tradeoffs.

Sequence diagrams that are understandable to everyone on your team — ⚡ Tl;dr Even though sequence diagrams are suited to visualizing low-level technical details, they are often used to communicate high-level flows with product and business stakeholders. At IcePanel we’re focused on making sequence diagrams easily understandable to your technical and non-technical team members. This article goes through some of the design decisions…

Sticky notes for whiteboarding and collaborating on your system designs with the C4 model — ⚡ Tl;dr The C4 model is a simple standard for visualizing software architecture for technical and non-technical audiences. We created these C4 model sticky notes for in-person whiteboarding and collaboration sessions with your team. They come in internal and external styles. 🚀 Let’s kick-off Before we get started, if you’re unfamiliar with the C4 model…

Visual and code-based diagramming and modelling tools for the C4 model — ⚡ Tl;dr The C4 model is a simple standard for visualizing software architecture for technical and non-technical audiences. Some tools in this article have great built-in support for the C4 model, and some of them have partial or plugin-assisted support. 🚀 Let’s kick-off The C4 model is a simple standard for visualizing software architecture for…

Advantages and disadvantages of the most common software architecture patterns — ⚡ Tl;dr A monolithic application is a software application compiled into a single executable, usually stored in a single source control repository. Microservice architectures include a series of independently developed and deployable services, stored in separate source control repositories or a mono repo. Even though they may be seen as “uncool”, monolithic…

Comparing 7 popular languages for designing and modelling software systems — 🚀 Let’s kick-off Due to the complex nature of software, there has always been a need to graphically visualize and communicate software architectures with others. Modelling and diagramming these systems and their abstractions allows us to analyze and improve the designs, resulting in higher-quality implementations when building them.