Technology

The Technology space is the second of the three big areas of the LeanIX VSM tool. Here all the information about a company's engineering stack is centrally documented.

Service Catalog

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What is a service?

A service to VSM is every independently deployable object - a microservice, micro frontend, a larger monolith, or some other type of service in a service-oriented architecture.

Typically, you will find the code for a service in a git repository, it will be built in your CI/CD pipeline, and then it might get deployed as a workload into k8s or published as a binary to internal and/or external users.

In VSM a service does not count individual deployments, rather 1 service can be simultaneously deployed multiple times.

At the core of the Technology space sits the service catalog. Same as other VSM catalogs, it can be tagged to further differentiate types of services or allow for another custom filtering.

For each service, a service page with specific details exists. From a basic description and relations to the Team and Product areas of VSM over links to external resources, the centrally relevant information is collected on this front page. In different tabs, we can find information sourced programmatically from different sources, such as code repositories.

Library Catalog

The library catalog is a global repository of the libraries and their corresponding licenses used in an organization. Sourced from software bills of material (SBOMs), it is a reliable source of direct and transitive dependencies of the service landscape. Akin to the other catalogs, it can be tagged to customize the collected data, such as recommending a remediation strategy centrally.

API Catalog

The API catalog provides central documentation around all APIs set into the context of the service and product catalogs. Tags can also be utilized here and are typically employed to differentiate high-level technical information of the APIs, such as their different authorization concept or release stages.

For each API exists a page with information on the specific catalog entry. Starting with basic information such as the description, version, and providing and consuming services, it can also be customized with tags for more detail. The dependent products and teams are automatically sourced from the service relation.

Tech Stack

The Tech Stack catalog offers comprehensive documentation for all the technologies and tools included within our technical ecosystem. This catalog helps users understand the various components and their interactions within our technology stack. Tags can also be applied here to categorize and distinguish key technical details, such as different programming languages, frameworks, or software versions used in our stack.

For each technology there is a side panel that contains more detailed information specific to the entry. It starts with a description and the default category tag. It can be customized by adding additional tags. Further down the page shows the usage of the technology in different teams, products and services.