Enabling Microservice Success: Managing Technical, Organizational, and Cultural Challenges

Cover
Copyright
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
	Why I Wrote This Book
	Who Should Read This Book
	Navigating This Book
		Part I: Context
		Part II: Organizational Structure and Culture
		Part III: Building and Operating
		Appendixes
		Case Studies
	Conventions Used in This Book
	O’Reilly Online Learning
	How to Contact Us
	Acknowledgments
Part I. Context
	Chapter 1. Understanding Microservices
		Defining the Microservices Architectural Style
			A Suite of Services
			Each Running in Its Own Process
			Communicating with Lightweight Mechanisms
			Built Around Business Capabilities
			Independently Deployable
			“Small”
			With a Bare Minimum of Centralized Management
			Heterogeneous
		Forerunners and Alternatives
			The Monolith
			Modular Monoliths
			Service-Oriented Architecture
		The Microservices Ecosystem
			Infrastructure as Code
			Continuous Delivery
			The Public Cloud
			New Deployment Options
			DevOps
			Observability
		Advantages of Microservices
			Independently Scalable
			Robust
			Easy to Release Small Changes Frequently
			Support Flexible Technology Choices
		Challenges of Microservices
			Latency
			Estate Complexity
			Operational Complexity
			Data Consistency
			Security
			Finding the Right Level of Granularity
			Handling Change
			Require Organizational Change
			Change the Developer Experience
		In Summary
	Chapter 2. Effective Software Delivery
		Regularly Delivering Business Value
			High Deployment Frequency
			Short Lead Time for Changes
			Running Experiments
			Separating Deploying Code from Releasing Functionality
			Handling Work That Goes Across Team Boundaries
		Adapting to Changing Priorities
		Maintaining Appropriate Service Levels
			When a Release Goes Wrong
			Knowing When Something Important Is Broken
			Restore Some Level of Service Quickly
			Avoid Failure Cascades
		Spending Most of Your Time on Meaningful Work
		Not Having to Start Again
		Keeping Risk at an Acceptable Level
		How Microservices Measure Up
		In Summary
	Chapter 3. Are Microservices Right for You?
		Reasons to Choose Microservices
			Scaling the Organization
			Developer Experience
			Separating Out Areas with Compliance and Security Requirements
			Scaling for Load
			Increasing Robustness
			Increasing Flexibility
		Conditions for Success
			Domain Understanding
			Products Not Projects
			Leadership Support
			Teams That Want Autonomy
			Processes That Enable Autonomy
			Technical Maturity
		Managing Change
		Sticking with a Monolithic Architecture
			Enable Zero-Downtime Deployments
			Build a Modular Monolith
		Everything Is Distributed Now
			The Rise of Cloud Native
			SaaS Makes Sense
		Recommendations
			Starting from Scratch
			Replacing an Existing Monolith
			Measuring Success
		In Summary
Part II. Organizational Structure and Culture
	Chapter 4. Conway’s Law and Finding the Right Boundaries
		Conway’s Law
		The Inverse Conway Maneuver
		Possible Boundaries
			Business Domains
			Locations
			Technologies
			Compliance
			Tolerance for Failure
			Frequency of Changes
			Recommendations
		Identifying When Boundaries Are Wrong
		In Summary
	Chapter 5. Building Effective Teams
		Organizational Culture
			Open
			Learning
			Empowering
			Optimized for Change
			The Westrum Model
		Effective Teams
			Motivated through Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose
			Aligned to Business Domain
			Appropriately Sized
			Cross-Functional and T-shaped
			Strong Ownership
			Long Lived
			Sustainable Cognitive Load
			High Trust and High Psychological Safety
			Part of a Group
		Optimizing for Flow
			Stream-Aligned
			Enabling
			Complicated Subsystem
			Platform
		In Summary
	Chapter 6. Enabling Autonomy
		What Is Autonomy?
			Why Does Autonomy Matter?
			Limits to Autonomy
		The Right Amount of Communication
		Interaction Styles
			Collaboration
			X-as-a-Service
			Facilitating
		Ways of Working That Support Autonomy
			Aligning on Outcomes
			Light Touch Governance
			Trust but Verify
			Agreeing and Aligning on Technology
			The Role of the Individual Contributor
			Minimum Viable Competencies
			Making Space for Learning
		Responsibilities of Autonomous Teams
			Active Ownership
			Communication and Cooperation
			Compliance with Standards
			Maintaining a Team Page
		In Summary
	Chapter 7. Engineering Enablement and Paving the Road
		What’s in a Name?
		Building a Platform
			Platform Services
			Organization-Level Concerns
			Building the Thinnest Viable Platform
			Build for the Needs of the Majority
			Platform as a Product
		Beyond the Platform
			Vendor Engineering
			APIs, Templates, Libraries, and Examples
			A Service Catalog
			Insights
		Paving the Road
			What Capabilities to Include
			Make It Optional
			Keep It Small
			How to Go Off Road
			Bringing the Treasure Back
			Internal Developer Portals
		Building a Platform People Actually Use
			Making Sure What You Build Meets a Need
			Market It
			Look for Signs You Are Getting It Wrong
		Principles for Building a Paved Road
			Optional
			Provides Value
			Self-Service
			Owned and Supported
			Easy to Use
			Guides People to Do the Right Thing
			Composable and Extendable
		Measuring Impact
		When to Invest in Engineering Enablement
		In Summary
	Chapter 8. Ensuring “You Build It, You Run It”
		Why Microservices Implies DevOps
			Release on Demand
			Work on Operational Features
		Building Things Differently
			Good Runbooks
			Running on Someone Else’s Servers
			Getting Comfortable in Production
		Supporting Your System in Production
			Assign Dedicated In-Hours Ops Support
			Improve Alerts and Documentation
			Identify the Haunted Forests
			Practice
		Out-of-Hours Support
			Allow People to Opt Out
			Formal Rotas Versus Best Endeavors
			Make Sure Calls Are Rare
			Only for Critical Systems
			Provide Support and Guidance
		Incident Management
			Blameless Culture
			Raising an Incident
			Roles to Assign
			During the Incident
			After the Incident
			Learning from Incidents
		In Summary
Part III. Building and Operating
	Chapter 9. Active Service Ownership
		Responding to the Log4Shell Vulnerability
		A Counter Example: Equifax and a Struts Vulnerability
		Ownership During Active Development
			Strong Ownership
			Weak Ownership
			Collective Ownership
		Once a Service Is Feature Complete
			No Ownership
			Nominal Ownership
			Active Ownership
		What Active Ownership Means
			Code Stewardship
			Upgrades and Patching
			Migrations
			Production Support
			Documentation
		Knowing Your Estate
			Your Own Software
			Dependencies
			Third-Party Software
		What You Need from a Service Catalog
			Graph-Based Model
			API-Driven
			Extensible
			Flexible Schema
			Provides Different Views Across the Estate
		Transferring Ownership
			What Does a Good Transfer Look Like?
			Meeting Quality Expectations
			Operational Handover
			Replacing
		What to Do If You’re Struggling
			Make the Business Case
			Start with Critical Systems
			Make Your Best Guess at Owners
			Deliver Value from the Data
			Aim for Continuous Improvement
			Look for Teams That Are Overwhelmed
			Services Shouldn’t Live Forever
		In Summary
	Chapter 10. Getting Value from Testing
		Why Do We Test?
			Building the Thing Right
			Building the Right Thing
			Picking Up Regressions
			Meeting Quality-of-Service Requirements
		Shifting Testing Left
		What Makes a Good Test?
			Fast and Early Feedback
			Easy to Change
			Finds Real Problems
		Types of Testing
			The Testing Pyramid
			Unit Tests
			Service Tests
			End-to-End Tests
			Contract Tests
			Consistency Tests
			Exploratory Tests
			Cross-Functional Testing
		Testing in Production
			Is It Safe?
			Staging Is Not Production-Like
			Your Customers Can Surprise You
			You Can’t Test for Every Variation
			You Don’t Have to Roll a Change Out to Everyone
			Monitoring as Testing
		Testing Your Infrastructure
			Chaos Engineering
			Testing Failovers and Restores
		Quality Is About More Than Testing
		What to Do If You’re Struggling
			Not Enough Automated Testing
			Tests That Aren’t Providing Value
		In Summary
	Chapter 11. Governance and Standardization: Finding the Balance
		Why Governance Matters
		Know Your Estate
		What Sort of Information Is Relevant?
		Guardrails and Policies
			Automating Guardrails
			What to Include
			The FT’s Guardrails
		Aligning on Guardrails
			Tech Governance Group
			Benefits of the TGG
		Choosing Technologies
			The Technology Lifecycle
			Save Innovation for Key Business Outcomes
			Use Boring Technology
			Limit the Alternatives
			Be Clear on Where Duplication Is Acceptable
			Expect Things to Change
		Insight Leads to Action
		Governance in Other Organizations
			Governance at Monzo
			Governance at Skyscanner
		What to Do If You’re Struggling
		In Summary
	Chapter 12. Building Resilience In
		What Is Resilience?
			Resilience for Distributed Systems
			Resilience for Microservices
		Understanding Your Service Level Requirements
			Service Level Objectives
			Error Budgets
		Building Resilient Services
			Redundancy
			Fast Startup and Graceful Shutdown
			Set Appropriate Timeouts
			Back Off and Retry
			Make Your Requests Idempotent
			Protect Yourself
			Testing Service Resilience
			Make Building Resilient Services Easy
		Building Resilient Systems
			Caching
			Handling Cascading Failures
			Fallback Behavior
			Avoiding Unnecessary Work
			Go Asynchronous
			Failover
			Backup and Restore
			Disaster Recovery
		Building a Resilient Platform
			Resilience to External Issues
			Internal Tooling
		Validating Your Resilience Choices
			Chaos Engineering
			Testing Backup and Restore
			Practice Makes Perfect
			Load Testing
			Learn from Incidents
			One Thing at a Time
		What to Do If You’re Struggling
		In Summary
	Chapter 13. Running Your System in Production
		Operational Challenges of Microservices
			Different Technologies Mean Different Support Knowledge Is Needed
			Ephemeral Infrastructure
			Rapid Change
			Alert Overload
			Complex Systems Run in Degraded Mode
		Building Observability In
			Logging
			Monitoring and Metrics
			Log Aggregation
			OpenTelemetry
			Focus on Events
			Distributed Tracing
			Archiving Observability Data
		Building Your Own Tools
		Spotting Issues
			Getting Alerting Right
			Healthchecks
			Monitoring Business Outcomes
			Understanding What Normal Looks Like
		Mitigation
		Troubleshooting
			Maintaining Useful Documentation
			Knowing What’s Changed
			Problems with External Systems
			Tooling Characteristics
		Learning from Incidents
		What to Do If You’re Struggling
		In Summary
	Chapter 14. Keeping Things Up-to-Date
		Why Is This a Challenge?
		Minimizing the Impact of Change
			Think About the Long Term
			A Reason to Be on the Paved Road
			Choose Managed Services and SaaS Options
			Provide APIs
			Immutable and Ephemeral Infrastructure
			Decommission and Deprecate
		Types of Change
			Emergency Changes
			Minor Planned Changes
			Major Planned Changes
		Responding to Change
			Understand the Landscape
			Define Guiding Policies
		Making a Decision
			Who Gets to Decide?
			Scheduling Work
		Managing Change
			Clarity
			Communication
			Empathy
			Execution
		What to Do If You’re Struggling
		In Summary
Afterword
	Why Microservices?
		The Importance of Flow
		Support for Autonomy
		The Rise of Platform Engineering
		Wrapping Up
Appendix A. Microservices Assessment
	Do You Need Microservices?
		Scaling Challenges
		Technical Reasons
	Spotting Potential Pitfalls
		Organizational Structure and Culture
		Software Delivery Approach
Appendix B. Recommended Reading
	Part I: Context
	Part II: Organizational Structure and Culture
	Part III: Building and Operating
Index
About the Author
Colophon