About the microservices rules: what good looks like

microservice architecture   architecting   team topologies   software delivery metrics   microservices rules  

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The 11 microservices rules are a great checklist that engineering leaders can use to assess the state of their organization, its delivery practices and its application’s architecture and keep their migration to microservices on track.

Why microservices rules

The microservice architecture has become increasingly popular over the past decade. Its key benefits include significantly improving the developer experience and accelerating software delivery. Sadly, however, microservices have often been widely misunderstood and used inappropriately. As a result, many organizations have struggled to benefit from their adoption. I’ve had numerous conversations where developers have complained that their new microservices-based applications are difficult to change. They have very quickly created an unmaintainable legacy application. To prevent this from happening, I’ve defined 11 development and architecture rules (a.k.a. best practices).

The 11 rules

Here are the rules:

1. Practice continuous delivery/deployment

2. Implement fast, automated deployment pipelines

3. Apply Team Topologies

4. Provide a great developer experience (DevEx)

5. Use a deliberative design process

6. Design independently deployable services

7. Design loosely coupled services

8. Design testable services

9. Develop observable services

10. Big/risky change => smaller/safer and (ideally easily) reversible changes - part 1 - incremental architecture modernization, part 2 - continuous deployment, part 3 - canary releases, part 4 - incrementally migrating users, part 5 - smaller user stories

11.Track and improve software metrics and KPIs

See the presentation

You can learn more about these rules from this presentation Microservices rules: what good looks like - July 2024 edition.

Speaking at your company

I’d be delighted to give a talk about microservices at your company. See here for more details.

Need help with accelerating software delivery?

I’m available to help your organization improve agility and competitiveness through better software architecture: training workshops, architecture reviews, etc.

Learn more about how I can help