Developers and architects will be familiar with it: software architectures are often highly complex and distributed. The result is unclear and disjointed information about development outcomes and the teams that maintain them.
This is where Atlassian Compass comes into play: Atlassian Compass is a management tool that assists developers in understanding, managing, and optimizing complex software architectures. It consolidates all information about engineering output and teams in one central location – in real-time. This helps companies of all types and sizes create a better developer experience and enhance operational processes in their technical departments.
A distributed software architecture is a set of loosely coupled, coordinated services running independently of each other, often across multiple sources of computing, in multiple regions. Each of these services has a specific function and contributes to an overarching result.
A distributed software architecture comes with advantages such as greater resilience to computational errors, higher adaptability, and independence. However, it also has some challenges. The connections between services create a complex, distributed system that requires precise coordination and optimization. Experienced operational teams are often necessary to handle the operational complexity, ensuring continuous deployments and frequent changes in architecture. Collaboration among multiple teams also requires precise communication and coordination. All involved parties must easily access the necessary knowledge to understand the product.
The uncontrolled and sometimes chaotic proliferation of software projects, systems, tools, and platforms is referred to as software sprawl and can lead to fragmentation, inefficiency, and a lack of coordination within development teams.
Nevertheless, an increasing number of development teams are adopting distributed software architectures. A variety of specifically designed tools and frameworks encourage creating new services rather than extending existing ones. Advanced CI/CD capabilities enable software teams to deploy less error-prone changes in a faster and automated manner, resulting in significant growth in development outputs, known as components.
With uncontrolled growth in their output, software teams often struggle to maintain complete and timely information about their software architecture. They need to adopt a holistic approach to software and service development that understands the entire process and the involved tools. A clear case for Atlassian Compass.
Compass is a developer portal that provides a unified real-time representation of engineering outpu in one place. With a comprehensive overview of all distributed systems, applications, and dependencies, development teams can easily trace their components – the results of their work – and connect not only with each other but also with the employees involved. It seamlessly complements Jira, which tracks the development team's effort in creating these components. This enables features for change tracking, version control, and automatic alerts, keeping teams up-to-date and allowing immediate responses to potential issues.
With Atlassian Compass, you:
Atlassian Compass allows you to establish the ultimate infrastructure for developers within days.
The Compass catalog provides a comprehensive overview of all software components within the organization. Serving as a central hub, it facilitates not only maintaining an overview of the software landscape but also streamlining collaboration between teams.
The catalog offers insights into service details with relevant APIs, libraries, documentation, crucial state metrics, latest deployment activities, readiness plans, and more. To populate the Compass catalog, components can be added manually or through an API or imported from an SCM tool.
You can expedite and standardize the process by using reusable and customizable templates seamlessly integrated into your organization's standards. Once significant changes to components are made, they can be propagated to all collaborating teams. The powerful search function allows you to find components based on names, descriptions, teams, custom fields, or labels.
The catalog enables developers to easily access components, gather information about them, and trace relationships to other components. It also allows documenting and tracking all upstream and downstream dependencies to analyze their impact on the performance of teams and services.
The Service health provides real-time monitoring of the current state of software components within the organization. For a better assessment of the condition, criteria weights can be assigned to define which components take priority. This allows teams to take action as needed to maintain or enhance the quality and performance of their services.
To derive effective insights from the Service status, Atlassian Compass provides useful features:
Compass was developed with publicly accessible APIs, allowing you to create your custom developer environment. This flexibility enables you to tailor Compass to your requirements and ensure optimal integration into your workflows. Another advantage is that by integrating observability, CI/CD, OSS, cloud infrastructure data, and more, you save valuable time.
You can extend, customize, and evolve Compass not only with existing integrations but also create your integration using Forge. Atlassian's application development platform helps you configure Compass to meet specific requirements. Build apps instead of infrastructures and let Atlassian manage computing resources, storage, and security.
Atlassian Compass offers the ability to create templates that integrate best practices, comply with your organization's standards, and include preset information, standard code, and webhooks. With these reusable and customizable templates, you accelerate and standardize the creation of software components, especially by automating repetitive tasks.
Templates also promote consistency in software development and ensure that essential information and metadata are not overlooked during component creation, thereby improving the quality and reliability of developed software components.
Do you want to know more about Atlassian Compass? Then get in touch with us now. We have the answers to your questions and will help you with the:
