Like soup-to-nuts. I know I need to document what I’m doing and I’ve started several times, but then I never go back and make updates. I don’t know if it’s just the ADHD or if I’m just going about it or thinking about it in the wrong way.
So I’m curious about:
- what you use for your documentation
- how you organize it
- what information you include
- how you work documentation into your changes/tinkering flow
Edit: Dang, folks! You all have given me a lot to read through, think about, and explore. Thank you!
If you have a mix of different systems both on-prem and cloud, and tie them together in various ways using VPNs, mesh or otherwise, create a graph using something like Excalidraw to give yourself a refresher on how everything connects. You want machines, hostnames, IPs, ports, and a list of services. You don’t have to be fancy by creating visual representations of each service, just a bulleted list. You only really have to update this when adding or removing compute.
If you’re running services on lots of different nodes, a spreadsheet that just maps services to whatever URL you use access them, to whichever backend server is running them. This takes minimum effort and gets you 90% of the way there.