Infrastructure and vendors

Infrastructure in the sidebar is a register of the estate: servers, the instances running on them, SaaS subscriptions, and the suppliers behind all of it.

It appears once an owner or admin switches it on under Settings → Workspace, and not before. It works with or without budgets — the two meet only when both are on.

The register

One row per thing. A machine, an instance on it, a subscription beside it.

Components nest: a server holds its instances, an account holds its seats. Put a component “on” another and the register indents it underneath.

Each row carries what you would expect — a kind, an environment, who supplies it, where it lives, what it is called on the network — and two dates that matter more than any of that.

The two dates, and why there is no “target architecture” document

This is the part worth reading properly, because it is not how these tools usually work.

There is no current landscape page and no future landscape page. Instead every component says when it joined the estate and when it leaves. The landscape on any day falls out of those two dates.

So “what runs today” and “what runs next March” are the same screen asked twice.

The alternative — keeping a current list and a target list side by side — breaks in ways everybody who has tried it recognises. The two drift apart. The target goes stale the first time somebody decommissions a machine for real and updates only one of them. And there is nowhere at all to put “in June we will briefly have both”, which is what a migration actually looks like.

With dates, none of that happens. Nobody has to remember to move anything from one list to the other. The day arrives and the picture is already right.

Note

Status is a label; the dates decide. Marking something planned does not put it in a future landscape — a date does. Status only answers where a date is missing: something marked retired with no end date is treated as gone, and something marked live with no start date as having always been here.

Something planned with no date is in no landscape

If you mark a component planned and give it no start date, it appears in neither the present nor any future — there is nowhere honest to put it.

It is not quietly dropped. The form says so while you are filling it in, and the landscape screen lists it above the comparison. A register that silently left things out of both answers would stop describing the plan.

Give it a date and it takes its place.

Comparing two days

The Landscape tab takes two dates and answers three things:

Gone by then	running on the first day, not on the second
Arrived by then	not running on the first, running on the second
In both	untouched

Beside them: what the estate costs a year on each day, and the difference. That is usually the number the meeting turns on.

Costs are shown per year, and one-off purchases — a rack you bought rather than rent — are counted separately rather than folded in. A year in which somebody bought hardware is not a year in which the estate got permanently more expensive.

Anything without a price is counted as unpriced rather than treated as free. An unpriced component is a price nobody has filled in, not a saving.

Moves

A move is a documented step from one landscape to the next: what it retires, what it brings in, by when, and which project is doing the work.

Naming the components rather than describing the step in prose is what lets the register check it. A move is finished when everything it retires has actually gone and everything it brings in is actually live — so the progress bar is read from the estate, not from the status somebody set.

Where the two disagree, the card says so:

The register disagrees with this status — check what is still running.

A plan nobody executed reads exactly like one that was executed, right up until something compares them. That comparison is the point of the tab.

Vendors, and the date people miss

Each vendor carries a contract window and a notice period in days.

Those two together give the day you stop being able to leave — the contract’s end date minus the notice. That is the date renewals actually surprise people on, and it is not one anybody can work out from a note. The vendors tab leads with the contracts whose notice date falls in the next ninety days.

Each vendor also shows what their components cost you a year, added up from the register.

Costs and the budget

Charge a component to a budget line and the budget’s Plan tab gains a column: the register says.

Neither figure wins. One is a plan somebody wrote and the other is an inventory of what exists, and the useful thing is being told when they have drifted apart — “we budgeted €4,500 a month for hosting, and the machines charged to that line add up to €5,200” is a sentence somebody does something about.

What this is not

Not discovery. Nothing scans your network or reads your cloud account. Every row is one somebody wrote down, which is why the register can be wrong — and why comparing it against reality occasionally is worth doing.

Not monitoring. No health, no uptime, no alerts. A component being in the landscape means somebody said it is there, not that anything checked.

Not a full CMDB. The only relationship is “runs on”. There is no change approval workflow and no configuration detail beyond what you type.