Enabling Microservice Success

Chapter 9. Active Service Ownership

In this chapter, I want to make the case for strong and active ownership of microservices. Strong, meaning that a service is owned by a team and its members decide what changes can be made to it. Active, meaning that dependencies get upgraded, alerts are monitored, and security vulnerabilities are patched. There is work involved in any code that is still running in production, even after the service is no longer under active development.

I will also make the case for knowing your estate. This is especially important when you have large numbers of services. I’ll share the key decisions we made when building Biz Ops, the tool the FT built to track our systems and teams and make sure we knew who owned what, and I’ll highlight the important aspects to consider when choosing your own solution.

It’s important to have this strong foundation in place, because things change. It’s pretty rare for an organization to have the same structure for more than a few years. Maybe the business environment changes, or you start to focus more on one product over another. Also, you can and should be reviewing things periodically to look for the pieces that don’t fit, where a service should be part of another domain or owned by another team. You’ll need to understand how to transfer ownership of a service, and I’ll make some suggestions for doing this effectively.

Finally, I want to talk about what to do if you are struggling with an estate where you don’t have a clear ...