Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

by Sam Newman

Probably the two poster children for the idea that organizations and architecture should be aligned are Amazon and Netflix. Early on, Amazon started to understand the benefits of teams owning the whole lifecycle of the systems they managed. It wanted teams to own and operate the systems they looked after, managing the entire lifecycle. But Amazon also knew that small teams can work faster than large teams. This led famously to its two-pizza teams, where no team should be so big that it could not be fed with two pizzas. This driver for small teams owning the whole lifecycle of their services is a major reason why Amazon developed Amazon Web Services. It needed to create the tooling to allow its teams to be self-sufficient. Netflix learned from this example, and ensured that from the beginning it structured itself around small, independent teams, so that the services they created would also be independent from each other. This ensured that the architecture of the system was optimized for speed of change. Effectively, Netflix designed the organizational structure for the system architecture it wanted.

Team structure in Amazon and Netflix