In What’s a service - part 1? I described the key aspects of a service, which includes its API, and its dependencies. A good way to document a service and its structure is to use a microservice canvas. A microservice canvas is concise description of a service. It’s similar to a CRC card that’s sometime used in object-oriented design.
I first read about the canvas back in 2017 in an DZone article by Matt McLarty and Irakli Nadareishvili. I’ve since adapted the structure of the canvas so that it emphasizes the interface (top of the canvas) and the dependencies (bottom of the canvas) and de-emphasizes implementation (middle of the canvas).
Here is an example of a microservice canvas.
It describes the Order Service
, which is part of my book’s example FTGO application.
The service’s external view is described by the following sections:
A service’s dependencies are described by the dependencies section, which consists of two parts
The canvas can also describe the service’s implementation, such as its domain model.
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