Components and Third Party Resources

[Kathryn Kosey]

I've been trying to wrap my head around the different ways to use compass components. Have others attempted to add the available third-party resources as components?

Example: accounts with tools like Sendgrid, or a hosted database service, or any other service we don't actually host, but integrate with.

In a cases like these, I could see it being useful to have the insights into which of our own repos reach out to that service as a dependency, as well as allowing other teams visibility into which third party services we're already working with.

However, then I'm not certain who would count as Owner Team, nor would any Scorecards or Repository be populated.

Is this approach an anti-pattern to the intended use of Compass?

[Andrei · Accepted solution]

Hi @Kathryn Kosey, thank you for reaching out!

Third party resources are a really interesting use case and something we had thought through a while back but ended up not really diving too deep into.

One of our early explorations was tracking the account as a component and having it be owned by the team who was on the hook for ensuring the vendor was paid.

At that point you could have individual components call out that dependency via the dependency graph (in your example, "Service X uses Sendgrid to send emails via account Y"), which would allow companies to assess the blast radius for a specific vendor.

As for scorecards, it really depends on what your baseline is for information you'd want to have easy access to for each vendor.

In my past startup experience I've had the pleasure of trying to figure out exactly which vendor was affected by a specific card being canceled, so that use case is top of mind for me whenever it comes to vendor management 😃

As to whether the approach is an anti-pattern, as long as it helps you make sense of your architecture and helps you manage your components, that's awesome and we'd be really interested in hearing about those use cases.

[Kathryn Kosey]

Thank you for the thorough response!

Yes, that's the kind of thing I want to streamline, along with avoiding the dreaded "well we didn't really document this integration and we're not sure who's supposed to handle communications with that vendor" coupled with sequentially asking multiple people in a chain before finally discovering what the expected flow is for submitting troubleshooting questions to that specific vendor. Quest sequences are great for games, but not as much for getting things done at work. 😆

I know a Confluence space might work as well, as long as people remembered to update it, but then I thought of Compass and thought it couldn't hurt to ask if others have already tried it there!