Modeling micro services / APIs in CSDM

[jonathanwaldo]

I work for a large global logistics organization that is seeking to utilize the CSDM to model its complex technology environment which heavily leverages the use of micro services / APIs in its application architecture. Currently we use the "web service" class to document about 3,700 unique components, created and updated as they are spit out of our DevOps pipeline. They are not discovered and thus, these are not instances of the services, but a representation of the code itself. Some of these components are mission critical; externally exposed to our global customer and supplier base or internal facing choke points for processing high volumes of transactions. An example could be an API that is used by a number of applications to call data from the MDM database. We often use these CIs in the Incident, Problem and Change processes.

My question for the community is, what is the right place to put these components in the CSDM? A business application with child Application Services representing environments? It kind of makes my head spin to think of 3,700 business applications just to represent our micro service and API components, along with 3-4x more for representing lower environment instances of those services.

Thank you!

[DaveHertel]

Hi Jonathan - here's 1 idea... I'm not saying its right 🙂 but i used your example to layout a model to experiment.   I'd like to hear from you and the community members -- what is right or wrong about this?  What would others do differently?

Hope this helps?

[jonathanwaldo]

Thank you, yes this is what I was I was talking about in my original post, but also wondering, do the "microAPI" components need an associated "Business Application" CI as well since they are instantiated across multiple environments.

Thanks for sketching this out!

[CMDB Whisperer]

I would not recommend identifying these components as Business Applications.  In CSDM 4.0 the SDLC Components were introduced to represent these individually deployable components, which can include microservices.  Basically they go in between Business Application and Application Service.  That said, at this time the SDLC Component CI Class is very bare-bones, and the recommended relationships leave a lot to be desired in my opinion, so I might suggest waiting until the model matures a bit more before doing so.

[talkapon]

for my curiosity, are those micro-services eventually deployed using Kubernetes?

What kind of information you have on the microservices when coming to register them? What can server as unique identifier?