Enabling autonomous teams with autonomous services

As we have just seen, our ability to drive down lead times and iterate to innovative solutions is impeded by many forces. Lean methods and the cloud help us eliminate waste, but our software itself is an impediment to innovation. The complex dependencies within our systems necessitate inter-team communication and coordination, which consumes valuable time. The high coupling between components creates the risk of cascading failures when things go wrong. So, teams naturally slow down for fear of breaking things.

We need a new architectural vision. Our architecture must enable autonomous teams to move fast and limit the blast radius of honest mistakes. The following diagram depicts this architectural vision. Imagine a topology of autonomous services that we design for integration from the ground up:

Figure 1.5: Event-first topology of autonomous services and subsystems

Each autonomous service owns all the resources it...