Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

Around 2002, Jeff Bezos’ sent a mandate to the Amazon engineering division that set out very specific rules for team organization:5 Each team is fully responsible for developing and operating its own service (whereby a service can be seen as one or more features of Amazon.com or AWS products). Each service is provided through an API, either for internal or external consumption; teams do not interfere or make any assumptions on other teams’ services architecture or technology. In line with the principle “you build it, you run it” popularized by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, “service teams” (as they’re called internally) must be cross-functional and include all the required capabilities to manage, specify, design, develop, test, and operate their services (including infrastructure provisioning and client support). These capabilities are not necessarily mapped to individuals; the team as a whole must provide them. Each individual has a primary area of expertise, but their contributions are not limited to it.