Flow Architecture Diagram

Flow is a visual tool that gives you an always up-to-date view of your entire system, helping you reason about your microservices architecture and identify which services depend on each other and how they work together.

Birds-eye view

Having access to a zoomed out representation of your system can be invaluable in pretty much all parts of the development cycle. Flow helps you:

• Track down bottlenecks before they grow into big problems.
• Get new team members onboarded much faster.
• Pinpoint hot paths in your system, services that might need extra attention.

Services and PubSub topics are represented as boxes, arrows indicate a dependency. In the example below the login service has dependencies on the user and authentication services. Dashed arrows shows publications or subscriptions to a topic. Here, payment publishes to the payment-made topic and email subscribe to it:

Highlight dependencies

Hover over a service, or PubSub topic, to instantly reveal the nature and scale of its dependencies.

Here the login service and its dependencies are highlighted. We can see that login makes queries to the database and requests to two of the endpoints from the user service as well as requests to one endpoint from the authentication service:

Real-time updates

Flow is accessible in the Local Development Dashboard and the Cloud Dashboard for cloud environments.

When developing locally, Flow will auto update in real-time to reflect your architecture as you make code changes. This helps you be mindful of important dependencies and makes it clear if you introduce new ones.

For cloud environments, Flow auto-updates with each deploy.

In the example below a new subscription on the topic payment-made is introduced and then removed in user service: