Dydation vs service catalogs
Catalogs and developer portals – Backstage, Compass, Cortex, OpsLevel, Port – are built from what scanners can see. And that is exactly why they go stale: the knowledge that actually hurts to lose was never in any scannable source. Dydation is not a catalog. It’s the memory layer that works alongside one: keep your catalog – add memory.
Your catalog
Knows what runs: services, deployments, on-call, scorecards. Built from what scanners can see.
Dydation
Knows what breaks, who to ask, and what you promised to remember – the knowledge no scanner can see, awake at the right moment.
| Service catalogs | Dydation | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary unit | A service – the deployable thing. | Anything you name: a module, feature, config, test environment, ritual. |
| Where data comes from | Integrations and scanners: repos, CI, Kubernetes, on-call tools. | People – plus file import that adds and updates, never silently deletes. Git/CI feeds are on the roadmap. |
| Dependencies | Runtime and service-level, from tracing and manifests. | Declared at any granularity, with impact visible both ways – down the tree and up. |
| The knowledge it holds | Metadata, docs links, scorecard checks. | The unwritten: “whoever touches this next needs to know…” – pinned to the exact node, on elements and on edges. |
| Time dimension | A snapshot, refreshed. Notes wait to be re-read. | Commitments sleep, then wake on a trigger – a task closes, an iteration opens, a dependency changes. |
| Ownership | From CODEOWNERS and on-call schedules. | People and teams with inheritance and explicit exceptions; a woken commitment lands on the owner’s dashboard. |
| Best at | Platform inventory, standards, self-service scaffolding. | Institutional memory: what breaks, who to ask, what to remember – surviving every goodbye. |
Honest footnote: if what you need is self-service scaffolding, a plugin ecosystem, or runtime service maps – that is exactly what catalogs are for, and you should keep yours. Dydation complements it; it doesn’t replace it.
Keep your catalog. Add memory.
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