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

[#1]

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.

[Keith Furnell]

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

1. It doesn't seem to be supported in config-as-code, at least as far as the generated compass.yml 😒
2. The map shows that a component is contained in others, but doesn't seem to display what those container components are?
3. No obvious way to View component from the Contains list of the map? 
4. 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.
5. 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]

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