Overview

Let’s get straight to it. Here is what’s new with Compass:

• Entity Catalog - Your system’s architecture can be broken down into multiple components, such as Services, Workflows, APIs, AWS resources, etc. We’re calling all of these Entities. As an organization, you can declare *n* number of entities you want to track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on. As organizations grow, people, systems, and their dependencies grow. Eventually, it takes time to keep track, communicate, and find relevant information at scale. An Entity Catalog solves this for you.
• Changeboards - System changes are inevitable. This rapid change means we’re always scrambling to understand where these changes occur, and how it impact our workflows. Changeboards provides a way to correlate entities in multiple ways — workflows, priorities, teams, or any other logical group. We can also understand their impact on each other, and our customers.

We’ll dive deep into these two portions below 👇

Entity Catalog

Think of an Entity Catalog as a menu for all your entities (services, components, flows, etc..) and their properties(team, tiers, etc...)

Why is this important?

• It makes communication between disparate teams and searching for system components and properties easier (just a CMD +K away).
• Provides common terminology to talk about entities.
• Keeps distributed teams in sync with the current state of the system.

Let’s understand this with an example;

If you had to find where the bread is in these two images, which one would be easier? Left, or the right one? The answer is pretty obvious - By neater segmentation, communication becomes easier. An entity catalog does this for you.

Think about how an organization scales. When multiple people in the system are dealing with different entities, entropy is inevitable. Shared knowledge is hard to find. It’s part scarce, part overwhelming.

How can you keep everyone aligned with the chaotic nature of the system, and the org as they compound? This motivated us to create an Entity Catalog.