The cloud is an enormous body of knowledge. Product names and feature sets from a single vendor can be overwhelming. An attempt to juggle offerings of many vendors benefits from a cross-reference built upon a common taxonomy. That taxonomy should be community owned and maintained. Community curation of this content is the focus of Lexical.cloud.

How does this differ from documentation?

Curation is a different exercise. Each cloud vendor has documentation in their product catalog:

Cloud vendors are best suited to explain their own product offering. Their documentation is the source of truth, and they are experts on all the features. Supplementing docs is not our goal. We’re curating the community placement of vendor products within a multi-cloud landscape.

Cloud vendors publish cross-references as tools for onboarding customers from other clouds:

The internet is full of sites that compare and contrast features of cloud products. Product documentation is accessible to anyone. What comparisons are made and omitted in the community reveal product perception and shape opinion.

Lexical.cloud focuses on modeling cloud industry lingo and alignment of vendor products as perceived by the community. While documentation informs the model of vendor intentions, community opinion decides when products are relevant.

How is this implemented?

Hugo pages capture the model data as metadata in a custom taxonomy.

The rendered static site uses a modified docsy theme. It serves as a tool for iterating on the content as a community. The content can be processed and rendered in other forms later.

Want to get involved?

Contributing is as simple as reporting issues with content. Pull request with corrections and additional content are also welcome. The initial focus is categorizing known products and reworking the model to be cloud agnostic. Take a closer looker at the Lexical.cloud website and repositories on Github.