Amey-Thakur Service catalog
Beyond a handful of services, the questions who owns this, what depends on it, and who to page become unanswerable without a catalog. The failure mode is a catalog that is manually maintained and therefore wrong.
Method
- Record ownership as the primary field. A team, not an individual, since individuals leave and ownership must survive them (see code-owners).
- Generate from source where possible. Metadata living with the code stays current, while a separately maintained registry drifts immediately.
- Capture dependencies in both directions. What a service calls and what calls it, which is what makes impact analysis possible (see agent-dependency-manager).
- Include the operational essentials. Runbook, dashboard, alerting destination, and tier, so an incident responder finds them in one place (see runbook-writing).
- Record lifecycle state. Active, deprecated, or retired, because an unmarked dead service consumes attention indefinitely (see feature-sunsetting).
- Enforce registration at creation. Provisioning that requires catalog entry is the only reliable way to keep coverage complete (see self-service-infrastructure).
- Audit against reality periodically. Compare the catalog to running services, since the gap is where surprises live.
Boundaries
A catalog records structure and does not enforce it. Manually maintained catalogs are wrong within months, which is why generation matters. Dependency data captured statically misses runtime coupling that only observability reveals (see distributed-tracing).