Microservice Architecture

Chapter 4. Establishing a Foundation

Now that we have a general model for establishing complex systems, we also need to come up with goals, principles, and guidelines for actually designing the system. A common challenge in creating a microservice architecture for your company is finding the right set of principles to govern the work. One easy answer is to just copy someone else’s successful model—to adopt the same goals, principles, and implementation patterns they used. This can work if the company you decide to mimic has the same general goals as your company. But that is not often the case. Each company has a unique set of priorities, culture, and customer challenges and simply taking on a fully formed model from some other organization is not likely to get you where you need to go.

In this chapter, we’ll review a capabilities model for microservices environments. We’ll also introduce the platform that represents the tools and services you provide your developer and operations teams to allow them to meet their objectives. The quality and fit of these tools has an important impact on your teams’ productivity. We will also review how company culture—including team size—can affect the resulting output of your teams.

Following that, we’ll focus on teams themselves; their size, communication modes, and the level of freedom they have to innovate within their own scope of work. There is quite a bit of research that shows that varying the size of the team has a direct impact on the ...