The goal of the architecture documentation workshop is to get an overview of the existing IT landscape that acts as a starting point for team onboarding, discussions

Attendees

• Facilitator / Documenter
  • experienced technologist, Facilitator, diagram drafter and questioneer
• BackendDevOps /
  • someone with access to infrastructure backend to share insights
• Technical counterpart at client
  • person that has knowledge of infrastructure
  • person that is able to forward team to other people that know more about specific part of infrastructure or knows

Research / Homework

1. request existing documentation, diagrams, access to codebase
2. decide if it is possible to create a first version of diagram without client (e.g. internally)
3. create draft version of diagram with knowns before starting the call with client
4. create invitations for workshop
5. facilitator prepare tools, diagrams and agenda on laptop before meeting

Agenda / Subjects

1. Pose the goal and agenda of the meeting, check available time for participants
2. Review existing draft of diagram
3. Reference existing diagrams
4. Start documentation of infra
   1. high level cloud vendors (google / amazon), vps vendors, on premise
   2. projects / sub tenants per cloud vendor
   3. Runtime services (Cloud Run, App Engine, Cloud Functions)
   4. containers / applications
      1. including the used technologies
   5. Databases (Datastores, MySQL, NoSQL)
   6. Storage (S3, blob storage, ftp)
   7. Secret stores (SecretManager, storage bucket)
   8. Service communication? (PubSub)
   9. Backups (database, rollback)
   10. Monitoring (uptime, performance, errors, logs)
   11. Domain names (and DNS records
5. How are all these apps linked together? Specific frontend for specific backend?
6. Source code versioning (bitbucket, github repo’s, monorepo)
7. CI/CD (tools used, automated builds/deploys, release frequency)

Tooling