Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

The solution to these kinds of multi-service integration problems is twofold: (1) “Platformize” the lower-level services and APIs with a thin “platform wrapper” that provides a consistent developer experience (DevEx) for stream-aligned teams with things like request-tracking correlation IDs, health-check endpoints, test harnesses, service-level objectives, and diagnostic APIs. This “outer platform” is built on a still lower-level platform, but that remains hidden from stream-aligned teams. (2) Use stream-aligned teams for each high-level business service responsible for operational telemetry and fault diagnosis: building and evolving “just enough” telemetry integration and diagnostic capabilities to be able to detect where problems occur. Being in control of telemetry and diagnostics enables the stream-aligned teams to trace and improve the flow of change in their stream (see Figure 8.8 on page 168). Figure 8.8: Example of a “Platform Wrapper” Increase flow predictability in higher-level business services (streams) through the use of a “platform wrapper” to “platformize” the lower-level services and APIs, allowing the streams to treat all their dependencies as a single platform with a holistic roadmap and consistent DevEx. The streams also have rich telemetry to track flow and resource usage of the platform. As part of the rich telemetry around each higher-level business service, the stream-aligned team builds and owns: (1) a lightweight digital-service “wrapper” that prov...