The two-pizza team

One of the most discussed microservice-based architectures that allows thousands of deployments per day at a large scale is the architecture of Amazon. They use the two-pizza rule for their team setup (Amazon, 2020):

"We try to create teams that are no larger than can be fed by two pizzas."

– Jeff Bezos

But how many people exactly can you feed with two pizzas? In our user groups, we always calculate one party pizza for three to four people. That would make a team size of six to eight people. At Giordano's in the US, they use the 3/8 rule – the number of pizzas you order should be three times the number of people to feed divided by eight:

This would result in a maximum of 5 to 6 people in each team. So, the size of a two-pizza team is not very well defined – and I think it has nothing to do with the hunger of the team members. The rule just means that the team should be small.

The problem with big teams is that the...