Crafting Engineering Strategy

Chapter 16. Service Migration Strategy

In early 2014, I joined Uber as an engineering manager for the Infrastructure team. We were responsible for a wide range of tasks, including provisioning new services. While the overall team I led grew significantly over time, the subset working on service provisioning never grew beyond four engineers.

Those four engineers successfully migrated 1,000+ services onto a new, future-proofed service platform. More importantly, that small team did it while absorbing the majority, although certainly not the entirety, of the migration workload rather than spreading it across the 2,000+ engineers working at Uber at the time. Their strategy serves as an interesting case study of how a team can drive strategy, even without any executive sponsor, by focusing on solving a pressing user problem—and providing effective ergonomics while doing so.

Reading These Documents

The documents in this chapter are recreations intended to capture my time at Uber, and they are written from the perspective of 2014. Read them as internal documents, written from the service provisioning team’s perspective. They are:

Document 16-1: Service Migration Strategy

The Infrastructure team’s approach to facilitating migration out of Uber’s Python monolith.

Document 16-2: Service Onboarding Model

A systems model of why service provisioning was going slowly.

Document 16-3: Wardley Mapping the Service Orchestration Ecosystem

A Wardley map of how we predicted service orchestration ...