Architecting for Scale

Chapter 15. Service Ownership

Chapter 12 stated that a service must be owned and maintained by a single development team within your organization, but we didn’t delve deeply into the specifics of what this means. In this chapter, we will explain what is meant by service ownership, and what is necessary for a Single Team Owned Service Architecture to work.

Single Team Owned Service Architecture

What is Single Team Owned Service Architecture (STOSA)? STOSA is an important guiding principle for large organizations that have many development teams that own and manage services comprising one or more applications.

What does it mean to have a STOSA application and organization? To be STOSA, you must meet the following criteria:

• Have an application that is constructed using a service-based architecture or a microservice-based architecture.

• Have multiple development teams that are responsible for building and maintaining the application.

• All services in your application must be assigned to a development team.

• No service should be assigned to more than one development team.

• Individual development teams may own more than one service.

• Teams are responsible for all aspects of managing the service, from service architecture and design, through development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and incident resolution.

• Services have strong boundaries between them, including well-documented APIs.

• Services maintain internal service-level agreements (SLAs) between them that are monitored ...