Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

Monolithic (Coupled) Releases A monolithic release is a set of smaller components bundled together into a “release.” When components or services can be built independently in CI but are only able to test in a shared static environment without service mocks, people end up bringing into that same environment all the latest versions of the components. They proceed to deploy the whole set of components as one, as this gives them confidence that what they tested is what will run in production. Sometimes this approach is also the result of having a separate QA team responsible for testing the different components (batching multiple service changes makes sense from the perspective of a QA team with limited capacity).