Building Microservices, 2nd Edition

Chapter 15. Organizational Structures

While much of the book so far has focused on the technical challenges in moving toward a fine-grained architecture, we’ve also looked at the interplay between our microservice architecture and how we organize our teams. In “Toward Stream-Aligned Teams”, we looked at the concept of stream-aligned teams, which have end-to-end responsibility for delivery of user-facing functionality, and at how microservices can help make such team structures a reality.

We now need to flesh out these ideas and look at other organizational considerations. As we’ll see, if you want to get the most out of microservices, you ignore your company’s organization chart at your peril!

Loosely Coupled Organizations

Throughout the book, I’ve made the case for a loosely coupled architecture and argued that alignment with more autonomous, loosely coupled, stream-aligned teams is likely going to deliver the best outcomes. A shift to a microservice architecture without a shift in organizational structure will blunt the usefulness of microservices—you may end up paying the (considerable) cost for the architectural change, without getting the return on your investment. I’ve written generally about the need to reduce coordination between teams to help speed up delivery, which in turn enables teams to make more decisions for themselves. These are ideas we’ll explore more fully in this chapter, and we’ll flesh out some of these organizational and behavioral shifts that are required, ...