Company
Date Published
Author
Nicola Camillo & Alberto De Lazzari
Word count
1358
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Nicola Kamila, an IT manager at Veneto Banca in Italy, and her colleague Alberto De Lazzari, discuss their experience with a graph-based tool used to govern the bank's IT infrastructure and architecture. The project aimed to adopt the microservices pattern and build a multichannel architecture, which relied on relationships between various components. They faced challenges such as documentation and governance, impact analysis, and developing automatic feature activation. To address these issues, they initially tried using a relational database but found it was not suitable for tracking or managing relationships. Instead, they discovered the power of graph databases, particularly Neo4j, which provided them with a natural way to represent entities and nodes connected by relationships. With Neo4j, they built a service catalogue that could answer questions about their IT system, automate steps in the process, and provide impact analysis. The tool allowed them to easily draw their data model on paper and integrate it into their existing systems. Ultimately, they found Neo4j to be a powerful tool for managing relationships, providing a whiteboard-friendly interface, and offering a powerful query language.