Documentation structure

Contents

Documentation structure#

This page describes how the documentation we maintain at https://infrastructure.2i2c.org is structured.

Audience#

The primary audience of this documentation is 2i2c Engineers, though anyone is welcome to peruse them for their own understanding if they wish.

Engineers are folks tasked with building, maintaining, debugging and fixing 2i2c infrastructure. Since we run our hubs openly, with best practices that can be adopted by anyone, we should try write these to be as accessible to non 2i2c staff as possible - no secret sauce, minimal 2i2c specific process.

Structure#

Infrastructure documentation is broken down into these main guides:

  • Site Reliability Guide. This guide covers day-to-day tasks undertaken by engineers as well as tasks that may need to be completed as part of the support process. It is also a place to document common problems and their solutions for future reference.

  • Hub Deployment Guide. This guide walks an engineer through the process of deploying a hub, step-by-step. It should document how to enable all the features we typically enable during a standard hub deployment.

The remainder of our documentation is organised as such:

  • “Get Started” tutorials help orient folks who might be working on areas they aren’t already familiar with and help them achieve a specific goal. These articles should have clear links to pre-requisite knowledge and how it can be acquired.

  • How-to guides demonstrate how to perform tasks that have not been automated yet, or enable extra features that are not part of a standard hub deployment. The titles of these guides should be of the form How do I <title>?

  • Topic guides go into greater depth of conceptual ideas around our infrastructure, why we deploy things the way we do, and what steps we have taken to automate some tasks. These articles are grouped together by a broad topic, such as “monitoring and alerting”. If the topic guide you are writing doesn’t belong to one of the pre-existing groups, feel free to create a new group if you suspect we will generate more documentation for that topic, or create it as a standalone article, such as the Enable specific hub features article.

  • References describe in detail parts of our infrastructure and its configuration. This should ideally be kept in the code describing our infrastructure - for example, terraform-docs for terraform code, JSON Schema based document generator for YAML, etc. This helps them keep in sync with what we are actually doing.