DEVOPSdigest

Multiplayer, a collaborative developer platform for teams who work on distributed software, officially announced its General Availability.

Multiplayer's new embedded observability features auto-document data flows and system architecture down to the component level, including dependencies and APIs. The product has been available in beta since February 2024.

Conceptualized and built by developers to fill a gap in the market, Multiplayer is a collaborative tool purpose-built for the complicated and multi-layered system architectures that underpin most companies' operations. Multiplayer replaces clunky and inefficient legacy diagramming tools and instead, visualizes system architecture holistically, and in its component parts, with software specifically built for this purpose.

Its new observability feature set, which is still in beta, uses Open Telemetry to capture distributed traces from your system to auto-document every technical decision and change to your platform. Instead of vital information sitting in a developer's head (or nowhere at all!), Multiplayer centralizes everything into a "single source of truth" and eliminates the risk of that archive walking out the door. The platform also streamlines the onboarding process and provides AI features that act as your distributed system's internal expert.

Says CTO and co-founder Thomas Johnson, whose 20-plus years as a developer informs every product decision, "Documentation is so important, especially in a distributed system. When changes aren't tracked, bad things happen - bad code, redundancy, technical debt, a lack of cohesion and the risk of losing everything when a key person walks out the door. We've removed the need to manually create and update documentation so your actual running system can be your source of truth."

Says CEO and co-founder Steph Johnson, "Our users fall into two camps - those who aren't doing any documentation, which has enormous security risks, and those who are documenting things manually, which is tedious and a waste of time. With Multiplayer, teams don't have to spend any time on documentation. Every change to the platform is captured and retained."