Consistent architecture or fast autonomous teams — you can’t have both.

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

There is a balance to be had, yes, consistency and alignment are great but they need to be balanced against the time to value. This means that at times we may consider to deliberately duplicating code in order to allow for autonomy and therefore speed to market.

we should be structuring our architecture around our teams, not the other way around

“organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” — Melvin Conway

applying this law in my experience usually doesn’t result in a lowered operating cost — rather it generally increases it at the benefit of time to value.

Microservices are a modern software architecture pattern which looks to break applications down into smaller decoupled parts which are loosely bound together to create a whole application or product.

Like many things the devil is often in the details, with microservices I’ve found that the real challenge is how one divides their application into small logical pieces which can act as lego blocks.

Versioning is a great way to not have to fully duplicate things, rather we build on top and create a new version of each microservice, thus allowing other teams to remain on a previous version and avoiding that snowball effect of changes — Team A have made changes and are now on v1.1 leaving Team B to remain on v1.0.

There is no perfect solution, rather it is a trade off between what you value more — cost, reuse and consistency? or are you happy for things to be a bit messy, inconsistent to enable for autonomy, adaptability and time to value?

I often ask clients in the past — do you want to be the cheapest company or the best? They’re competing goals, you cannot have one with the other.

Cheap is easy, just continue to do what you are doing but if you want faster value realisation, to be responsive and adaptable then you need to think and behave in a different way.