What is Atlassian Compass?

Compass is a developer experience platform and service catalog that brings your distributed software architecture and the teams collaborating on them together in a single, unified place. With predefined scorecards like application readiness and DevOps health, out-of-the-box metrics including deployment time and frequency, build success rate, availability, and MTTR, dependency maps, and more—Compass helps make it intuitive to improve developer velocity and experience, maintain ops readiness, and apply security governance.Started in 2018 as an internal Atlassian tool, Compass is now available in beta for engineering teams focused on managing their distributed architecture and teams.

Profile

Compass is a developer experience platform and service catalog that brings your distributed software architecture and the teams collaborating on them together in a single, unified place.

With predefined scorecards like application readiness and DevOps health, out-of-the-box metrics including deployment time and frequency, build success rate, availability, and MTTR, dependency maps, and more—Compass helps make it intuitive to improve development velocity and satisfaction, maintain ops readiness, and increase security standards.

Compass includes easy integrations with popular tooling, such as GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, LaunchDarkly, New Relic, AWS, CircleCI, and more. In addition, Compass is built entirely on publicly accessible APIS backed by GraphQL, allowing you to connect information across your toolchain and craft a unified experience that improves developer productivity and happiness with ease.

Compass is currently available for free in beta. Sign up here to get started.

Focus

Compass helps teams tame software sprawl by intuitively providing a single source of truth for their distributed software architecture, and helping them understand what’s been built, who owns it, their operational health and policies applied to them. It offers insights into problem areas that need attention and changes that have happened over time, helping teams improve their architecture and development velocity.

Background

In 2018, Compass was built as a way for Atlassian’s large, distributed engineering team to internally document and track all of their services and dependencies, maintain ops readiness and security standards, improve time to delivery metrics, and increase overall developer satisfaction.

However, while we worked with our customers as they migrated to managed cloud services and containerized their applications across hundreds (or even thousands) of microservices, they often asked how Atlassian engineers were dealing with the increased complexity and cognitive load within our own highly distributed environment.

As a direct result, we externally released Compass in 2022 to provide a simple way for engineering orgs to connect their services, libraries, and components in a centralized developer experience platform and service catalog.

Today, Compass is available for platform engineering teams—as well as application development teams—that want to quickly start exploring their services, documentation, libraries, tooling, and dependencies in a single, unified place.

Atlassian Compass main features

Service Catalog

Keep track of your ever-evolving technical architecture, metadata, dependencies, metrics, and the teams that collaborate around them in one central place.

DevOps health‍

Codify, operationalise, and apply engineering best practices at scale and keep your architecture in a healthy state. Give teams autonomy while ensuring security, compliance, and reliability best practices are maintained.

Extensibility engine‍

Compass is built entirely on publicly accessible APIs backed by GraphQL, allowing you to connect information across your toolchain and craft a unified experience that improves developer productivity and happiness with ease. In addition, Compass includes easy integrations with popular tooling, such as GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, LaunchDarkly, New Relic, AWS, CircleCI, and more.