Aligning Your Team around Microservices When There’s No Precise Definition

This is a guest post by Roger Jin, Software Architect at ButterCMS and co-author of Microservices for Startups.
For a profession that stresses the importance of naming things well, we've done ourselves a disservice with microservices. The problem is that that there is nothing inherently "micro" about microservices. Some can be small, but size is relative and there's no standard of unit of measure across organizations. A "small" service at one company might be one million lines of code while far less at another.
Some argue that microservices aren’t a new thing at all and rather a rebranding of Service Oriented Architectures, while others advocate for viewing microservices as an implementation of SOA similar to how Scrum is an implementation of Agile.
How do you align your team when no precise definitions of microservices exist? The most important thing when talking about microservices on a team is to ensure that you are grounded in a common starting point.
But ambiguous definitions don’t help with this. It would be like trying to put Agile into practice without context for what you are trying to achieve, or an understanding of precise methodologies like Scrum.


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The company joined CNCF and the Open API Initiative.
