Microservices rules: what good looks like

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to microservices.io.


Considering migrating a monolith to microservices? Struggling with the microservice architecture? I can help: architecture consulting and workshops. Learn more


Microservices rules: what good looks like

The 11 microservices rules are a great checklist that engineering leaders can use to assess the state of their organization, its delivery practices and its application’s architecture and keep their migration to microservices on track.

Why microservices rules

The microservice architecture has become increasingly popular over the past decade. Its key benefits include significantly improving the developer experience and accelerating software delivery. Sadly, however, microservices have often been widely misunderstood and used inappropriately. As a result, many organizations have struggled to benefit from their adoption. I’ve had numerous conversations where developers have complained that their new microservices-based applications are difficult to change. They have very quickly created an unmaintainable legacy application. To prevent this from happening, I’ve defined 11 development and architecture rules (a.k.a. best practices).

The 11 rules

Here are the rules with links to detailed explanations:

  1. Practice continuous delivery/deployment
  2. Implement fast, automated deployment pipelines
  3. Apply Team Topologies
  4. Provide a great developer experience (DevEx)
  5. Use a deliberative design process
  6. Design independently deployable services
  7. Design loosely coupled services
  8. Design testable services
  9. Develop observable services
  10. Big/risky change => smaller/safer and (ideally easily) reversible changes - part 1 - incremental architecture modernization, part 2 - continuous deployment, part 3 - canary releases, part 4 - incrementally migrating users, part 5 - smaller user stories
  11. Track and improve software metrics and KPIs

See the presentation

You can learn more about these rules from this presentation Microservices rules: what good looks like - July 2024 edition.

Speaking at your company

I’d be delighted to give a talk about microservices at your company. See here for more details.

Need help with accelerating software delivery?

I’m available to help your organization improve agility and competitiveness through better software architecture: training workshops, architecture reviews, etc.

Learn more about how I can help

Older messages

Reminder: Microservices rules: what good looks like

Thursday, February 27, 2025

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to microservices.io. Considering migrating a monolith to microservices? Struggling with the microservice architecture? I can help: architecture

What developer productivity metrics actually measure

Thursday, February 27, 2025

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to microservices.io. Considering migrating a monolith to microservices? Struggling with the microservice architecture? I can help: architecture

Reminder: Microservices ate my application - an anti-pattern

Friday, February 14, 2025

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to microservices.io. Learn about the service collaboration patterns (Saga, API composition, etc) in my online, self-paced bootcamp. It's

Reminder: The problem with tight runtime coupling and how to avoid it

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to microservices.io On Wednesday, January 22, 2025 at 6pm, I'll be giving a talk in Melbourne Australia.The talk is: Enabling DevOps and Team

The problem with tight runtime coupling and how to avoid it

Thursday, January 9, 2025

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to microservices.io On Wednesday, January 22, 2025 at 6pm, I'll be giving a talk in Melbourne Australia.The talk is: Enabling DevOps and Team

You Might Also Like

Daily Coding Problem: Problem #1703 [Hard]

Thursday, February 27, 2025

Daily Coding Problem Good morning! Here's your coding interview problem for today. This problem was asked by Goldman Sachs. Given a list of numbers L , implement a method sum(i, j) which returns

Charted | The $124 Trillion Global Stock Market, Sorted by Region 📊

Thursday, February 27, 2025

In this graphic, we show the world's 48000 publicly-traded companies, collectively valued at $124 trillion. View Online | Subscribe | Download Our App Enjoying Visual Capitalist? You'll love

AI CAPTCHA Fails Are the Internet’s New Comedy Show!

Thursday, February 27, 2025

Top Tech Content sent at Noon! Boost Your Article on HackerNoon for $159.99! Read this email in your browser How are you, @newsletterest1? 🪐 What's happening in tech today, February 27, 2025? The

Say Goodbye to Type Erasure

Thursday, February 27, 2025

View in browser 🔖 Articles Practical Kotlin: When and How to Use inline reified, noinline, and crossinline Master Kotlin's inline reified functions to tackle type erasure and boost performance!

SRE Weekly Issue #464

Thursday, February 27, 2025

View on sreweekly.com A message from our sponsor, incident.io: For years, on-call has felt more like a burden than a solution. But modern teams are making a change. On Feb 26 at 1 PM EST, hear why—and

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds, More

Thursday, February 27, 2025

Home | News | How To | Webcasts | Whitepapers | Advertise .NET Insight February 27, 2025 THIS ISSUE SPONSORED BY: ■ Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas: .NET Developer Training Conference ■ VSLive! 4-Day

Re: Tomorrow's Password Class: How to sign up!

Thursday, February 27, 2025

Hi there, Do you reuse passwords? Do you struggle to remember unique passwords across accounts? Have you tried setting up a password manager but found it to be a hassle? You might not realize how

Documenting Event-Driven Architecture with EventCatalog and David Boyne

Thursday, February 27, 2025

If you're wondering on how to document Event-Driven Architecture, or you don't know that you should, I have something for you. We discussed with David Boyne, why data governance practices and

wpmail.me issue#708

Thursday, February 27, 2025

wpMail.me wpmail.me issue#708 - The weekly WordPress newsletter. No spam, no nonsense. - February 27, 2025 Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. News & Articles Shaping

Hackers stole 1Password logins - here's how

Thursday, February 27, 2025

Amazon AI races ahead; Research agents; Smartwatch trade-in -- ZDNET ZDNET Tech Today - US February 27, 2025 thief stealing passwords Hackers stole this engineer's 1Password database. Could it