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Introducing EventCatalog Federation

· 4 min read
David Boyne
David Boyne
Founder of EventCatalog

We are happy to share the first initial release of EventCatalog Federation.

EventCatalog Federation

EventCatalog Federation is a new plugin that allows you to merge multiple EventCatalog instances into one for a single source of truth.

In this blog post we will cover why federation might be useful for you and your teams, how it works, and how you can get started.

Why EventCatalog Federation?​

In 2024 we have seen a lot of companies and teams adopting EventCatalog. We have seen teams use EventCatalog to document their event-driven architectures and microservices.

Many teams are using EventCatalog as a single source of truth for their domains, services and messages . This gives organizations a single source of truth for their documentation.

EventCatalog is helping developers, architects and business stakeholders understand their architectures and quickly find the information they need.

Whilst speaking to our community we have learned that many teams want the ability to keep their documentation close to their code and still continue to have the single source of truth for their organization.

EventCatalog Federation allows your teams to have their own EventCatalog, stub out dependencies and provide an ability to merge multiple catalogs into one main catalog.

This allows your teams to keep their documentation close to their code, store their documentation in git whilst continuing to provide value to the organization.

How does EventCatalog Federation work?​

EventCatalog Federation

Teams owning their own documentation​

Your teams create their own EventCatalog instance, they can use the eventcatalog CLI to create a new catalog.

Your teams own their own documentation, domains, services and messages (all optional). This allows your teams to focus, document what they are doing and what they are consuming.

If your team consumes a dependency from another team, you can use the new EventCatalog stubs to mock them out in your own catalog.

Once teams commit their documentation to their repository, they can run the federation generator to merge their documentation into a main catalog. This main catalog provides the organization with a single source of truth for the entire architecture.

To dive deeper and get started with EventCatalog Federation, read our EventCatalog Federation Setup Team Catalog guide.

Organization EventCatalog​

You will create a main EventCatalog instance that uses the federation generator to merge all the EventCatalog instances from your teams.

Using the federation generator you can specify the source repository to pull from, the branch to pull from, the files to copy from the source repository to your main catalog and if you want to override any conflicts (last-write-wins).

Merging many catalogs into one provides your developers, architects and business stakeholders with a single source of truth for your organization.

The single source of truth lets you see the entire architecture of your organization, and provides a way to understand the dependencies between your teams.

Developers can quickly understand and search for the information they need, and business stakeholders can understand the entire architecture of the organization and start to define business processes (flows) for EventCatalog.

Getting started​

To get started you can read the following guides:

Summary​

EventCatalog Federation is a new plugin that allows you to merge multiple EventCatalog instances into one for a single source of truth.

This allows your teams to keep their documentation close to their code, store their documentation in git whilst continuing to provide value to the organization.

We are excited to see what you build with EventCatalog Federation and we are looking forward to seeing the EventCatalog community grow in 2025.

If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know in the EventCatalog Discord.