TIL Stub: Why redirects are important

As you may have noticed, I’ve been learning about DevOps, Cloud Foundry, BOSH, etc. as part of my new job. It’s been a great time so far, but one issue I’ve repeatedly come across is broken links to Cloud Foundry documentation. This is especially frustrating when trying to learn, since I rely on the documentation to figure out what’s going on, where it’s going on, why it’s going on, etc.

The crux of the issue is that at some point relatively recently, the team working on Cloud Foundry decided to change the directory structure of their web pages. The documentation appears to have been split amongst three URIs:

• Pivotal Web Services Docs – docs.run.pivotal.io
• Pivotal CF Docs – docs.gopivotal.com/pivotalcf
• Cloud Foundry Open Source Docs – docs.cloudfoundry.org

Having more than one option to search through can be a headache. For example, one Pivotal CF blog post I was recently reading (written last December) made reference to the Cloud Foundry’s V2 Service Broker API, linked as:
http://docs.cloudfoundry.com/docs/running/architecture/services/writing-service.html

When I clicked on that link in the blog post, I was redirected to docs.cloudfoundry.com. This page simply reiterates what I said above – the linked article could be in one of three places. If I am determined, I can search through each one until I find which of these options the article has been migrated to. My first instinct was to try the Open Source Docs, but none of the initial docs found seem to be quite what the blog seemed to be referring to:

It would be nice if a redirect was put in place for at least a little while to take new (and old) users where they needed to go, which I will take as a lesson learned for myself and my future as a programmer in any capacity: if you move something around, make sure it still easily found using the existing/familiar mechanisms.