Principles of Microservices

Some principles that should be followed when designing micro services.

Accuracy – Fail hard or show full accurate results, never in between.

Our goal is to provide precise numbers customers trust. Sending incomplete numbers because our systems aren’t healthy can’t be an excuse, we should follow the rule of “all or nothing”.

Scalability – Predictable way to increase capacity.

Growing only the components that are over loaded. It’s easier to identify bottlenecks when it’s components that are fully instrumented and provide an accurate view of their performance.

Simplicity – Getting the whole picture and how our product is reflected in technology takes no more than one hour for anyone.

It’s important for new and existing team members to understand how system work and be able to jump into any area and figure out details as soon as possible.

Speed – Deliver as soon as we have new feature or bug fix.

Untestable code, long deployment cycles, high degree of dependencies or manual QA-ing are all blockers to make sure customers get fixes and features as soon as possible.  Small components with regression tests yield rapid deployment.

Ownership – Every component of the system is owned

Owner is the person who can answer any question about the service: current state, technical debt, development plan, core metrics, absolute numbers, issues etc.