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🚀 New in Compass: Vertical Dependencies (“contains/contained by”)!

Alastair Wilkes

We’re excited to announce the launch of vertical dependencies in Compass! 🎉

What’s new?

You can now model hierarchical relationships between your components using the new “contains/contained by” dependency type. This means you can represent how components are grouped by application, capability, etc. right alongside existing horizontal (peer-to-peer) dependencies.

Key highlights:

Add, view, and manage vertical dependencies between any component
Visualize hierarchies in both list and map views, making it easier to understand your architecture at a glance
Quickly navigate between “contains” and “contained by” relationships for any component
Compass now defaults to map view for a big-picture understanding of your component landscape

Why does this matter?

Platform engineers and developers can now map their software architecture in Compass the way their organization actually works. Vertical dependencies help you:

Accelerate onboarding and decision-making
Improve visibility into complex systems
Make Compass your single source of truth for service ownership and documentation

How does it work?

Add vertical dependencies via the UI or API, just like you do with horizontal dependencies
See both horizontal and vertical relationships in the dependency map, just expand the current component
Easily switch between “contains” and “contained by” lists for each component (in the list view)

We’d love to hear your feedback! Try out vertical dependencies in Compass and let us know how it helps you model your architecture more effectively.

Comments

Keith Furnell

Defaulting to the map view is good, and this feature looks potentially useful, but:

It doesn't seem to be supported in config-as-code, at least as far as the generated compass.yml 😒
The map shows that a component is contained in others, but doesn't seem to display what those container components are?
No obvious way to View component from the Contains list of the map?
Is "Dependencies" still the right name for this page (especially given the presence also of "Package Dependencies")? For example "Relationships" would seem both more generic and distinct.
It would now be useful to be able to convert a dependency type (rather than delete and re-add) in the UI

Incidentally, is there any chance of providing an optional annotation to relationships? That would really add value to the map view for us.

Jeff Madison

> It doesn't seem to be supported in config-as-code

If true, this feature isn't really launched IMHO. Config-as-code should be an MVP requirement for any feature.

Hopefully not true and the doc updates are just lagging a bit. But as of the last update today, the docs (here and here) still say the only supported dependency type is `DEPENDS_ON`.

Rafael Ferreira_wpafr0

@Jeff Madison that's an oversight on our part and we're already working to update the docs

Boris Gordon

Are you planning on adding navigation support to the map view for vertical dependencies (and allow for component names to be read without being cut off) ?

Keith Furnell

It looks like the Add component dependencies link that @Jeff Madison referenced has been updated, but not Structure and contents of a compass.yml file.

Does that mean that the oversight was only with the former, and that this feature (like Documentation and More Details) is indeed not yet supported in config-as-code?

Joseph T. Bradley

I was very excited about the vertical dependencies relationship. In particular, I've setup a custom "Product" component type that allows me to reference an entire suite of products together, and really wanted to use the CHILD_OF (the relationship as it shows up in the GraphQL results) relationship to define the child products. The fact that this doesn't work in the `compass.yml` file really hampers my ability to scale this out across our repositories. I'd agree with @Jeff Madison that without the ability to use it in config as code, I don't consider this to be truly launched.

Keith Furnell

Having solicited this feedback, is there any response other than an unspecific documentation amendment?

Rafael Ferreira_wpafr0

Does that mean that the oversight was only with the former, and that this feature (like Documentation and More Details) is indeed not yet supported in config-as-code?

That's right, vertical dependencies is not supported in config-as-code yet but that's something we want to do - eventually. The catch here is that we are transitioning how our code repository integrations work (to be much easier to setup and manage) and we don't want to pile on more capabilities that would have to be migrated later.

Jeff Madison

Can Atlassian please put more details in the published Compass roadmap? This new vertical dependency feature was never on it. There is only one thing on the roadmap right now. The list of accepted enhancement requests is empty. So what is Atlassian actually planning for Compass? Help us out here.

Alex Sandro Lemos Martins

I would like to know if there is any news about the implementation of the "contains/contained by" relationship via config-as-code.

It's not yet listed on the Compass roadmap.

Jean-Pierre Bolduc_q1n027

I don’t understand why “config as code” isn’t included in the MVP of any feature. Without it, the feature is essentially useless and not maintainable.