Self-hosted software architecture modeling and simulation

Your company has one system and a hundred maps of it.

Every team draws its own corner, in its own words, in its own tool. Obelisk gives them one shared model of your systems and the connections between them. Diagrams are views of that model, and simulations run scenarios against it.

Request access or write to support@tryobelisk.io

The slabs are the story. Each chapter ends with a real screen from the product.

Scroll to bring them together

Four teams. Four names for one database.

Paymentscalls it the DB
Platformcalls it orders-prod-rds
Datacalls it system of record
Mobilehas never heard of it

Nobody is wrong, and nobody can check. Each name makes sense from inside one team and nowhere else.

What does your team call it?

Name it once. Everyone means the same thing.

In Obelisk a box isn't a drawing on someone's slide. It's an object in one shared model, and every team's diagram is a view of it. Rename it once, and every view follows.

Open any object to see what it is, who owns it, and how many diagrams it appears on.

Obelisk object panel for Orders DB: a store owned by the Ordering team, on 3 diagrams, running PostgreSQL, with the decision behind it — Real screenThe object panel. One Orders DB, one set of facts, whichever diagram you opened it from.

Every team on one landscape.

Every team's systems in one model. Each team keeps its own diagrams to tell its own story, and all of them are views of the same objects underneath.

The Landscape Map lays the whole thing out on one board, and every object carries its owning team and its tags. Wondering who runs something? Click it, and the answer is right there.

Obelisk Landscape Map of the Ordering area, with stores drawn as cylinders and boundaries as raised floors — Real screenThe Landscape Map. Yes, this part is real: one board, stores as cylinders, boundaries on the floor.

Every altitude, one map.

Zoom from the whole company to one service, then open it and look inside. Objects nest as deep as your system goes: account, network, service, component.

The CTO and the new hire read the same model. They just open different views.

Obelisk component diagram of the Order service internals: three components and the Orders DB they write to — Real screenA component diagram. Each part shows where it lives: Mealwheel › Ordering › Order service.

Follow a request across the org chart.

Flows walk a request step by step through every team it touches. The handoffs nobody wrote down become steps anyone can replay.

1The iOS app sends the orderMobile
2The mobile backend passes it onMobile
3The gateway checks who's askingPlatform
4Checkout writes the orderPayments

Alternate and parallel paths included.

Obelisk flow playback of Take a payment on step 5 of 6: Payments service records the payment in Ledger DB on the Card approved path — Real screenFlow playback, step 5 of 6. The card went through, so the Card declined path is skipped.

Ask where the answer lives.

Comments pin to the diagram, right next to what they're about, so a question about the order queue sits beside the order queue, not in a chat thread that scrolled away. Mark it as a question, an idea or an inaccuracy, so anyone who spots a wrong box can say so right on it. Resolve it once it's handled.

Decision records live in the landscape they shaped, with a status timeline and links to the diagrams, drafts, objects and connections involved. Approved and superseded ones lock. Next year's new hire finds the why without having to find you.

Obelisk decision record ADR-3, Kafka as the event bus: approved, with its status history and links to a related decision and the Event bus — Real screenA decision record with its status history: in progress, then approved.

Change it together.

Propose a change as a draft. Every team sees it on the same map, in place, before it merges into the live model.

Snapshots freeze the whole landscape, so you can always see what the map looked like when you decided.

Obelisk draft editor for Async checkout, with 6 changes and a Merge button; the draft adds an Order events queue — Real screenA draft that puts a queue between ordering and the kitchen: 6 changes, ready to merge.

Then test a scenario.

Put small rules on objects, like a rate limit or a cache hit ratio, written as a few lines of JavaScript. Then send a steady stream, a spike or a ramp of traffic through the model. When a message fails, its trace shows which object stopped it, and so which team to call.

Same seed, same run. The rules are yours, so every outcome traces back to them.

Obelisk message trace for m-3059: it passed three rules, then the Order service rate limit failed it — Real screenA failed message's trace: every rule it met, in order, until the Order service rate limit stopped it.

The scene is a sketch. The tool is real.

There are no floating slabs in the product. Obelisk is a diagram editor on a shared model: objects, connections, a Landscape Map, flows, rules, simulations, comments, decision records and drafts, in one browser app that runs on your own servers.

The Obelisk diagram editor during a simulation, with the Orders DB connection pool full and a message trace open — Real screenA simulation paused at 2.10 seconds. The Orders DB pool is full, and the panel traces one message through every rule it met.

One model. Every perspective.

Model your systems and relationships once. Give every team a view of the same architecture, and stop explaining it one meeting at a time.

Request access or write to support@tryobelisk.io

Self-hosted on your servers. SAML and OIDC sign-in included. Every feature in every install.