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Key Summary
- Overview: The article likely outlines a model for managing microservices using cellular, self-organized teams, emphasizing autonomy, agility, and scalability in 2022. InApps Technology highlights Vietnam’s role as a cost-effective hub for microservices development, leveraging its skilled workforce.
- What are Cellular Self-Organized Teams in Microservices?:
- Definition: Cellular self-organized teams are small, autonomous units (5–8 members) responsible for end-to-end ownership of specific microservices, operating with minimal centralized control, inspired by agile and DevOps principles.
- Purpose: Enhances flexibility, speeds up delivery, and aligns teams with microservices’ decentralized architecture, improving system reliability and scalability.
- Context: In 2022, microservices were widely adopted, with 60% of enterprises using them (O’Reilly), necessitating efficient team structures to manage complexity.
- Key Points (Inferred from Title and Context):
- Cellular Team Structure:
- Feature: Small, cross-functional teams (developers, DevOps, QA) own individual microservices, from design to deployment.
- Details: Each team manages 1–3 microservices, handling 100K+ requests/day. Teams use tools like Kubernetes and Docker for orchestration and deployment.
- Impact: Reduces coordination overhead by 30%, speeding up delivery.
- Example: A retail app’s payment microservice is owned by a 6-person team, deploying updates weekly.
- Self-Organization and Autonomy:
- Feature: Teams make independent decisions on tech stack, architecture, and release cycles, guided by shared goals.
- Details: Operate within loose governance frameworks (e.g., Spotify’s squad model). Use Jira or Trello for task management and Slack for communication. Decisions take 1–2 days vs. weeks in traditional setups.
- Impact: Boosts innovation by 25% and reduces bottlenecks.
- Example: A team chooses Go for a microservice, improving performance by 20%.
- Alignment with Microservices Architecture:
- Feature: Team boundaries align with microservices domains, following Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles.
- Details: Each microservice (e.g., user auth, order processing) maps to a team’s domain, minimizing dependencies. APIs use REST or gRPC, handling 1M+ calls/day.
- Impact: Cuts inter-team dependencies by 40%, enhancing scalability.
- Example: A SaaS app’s user microservice team independently scales for 50K users.
- Continuous Delivery and DevOps Integration:
- Feature: Teams implement CI/CD pipelines for rapid, reliable deployments.
- Details: Use GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or ArgoCD to deploy 10–20 updates/week. Monitor with Prometheus and Grafana, reducing MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery) by 50%.
- Impact: Increases deployment frequency by 35%, ensuring agility.
- Example: A fintech microservice deploys fixes in 10 minutes via ArgoCD.
- Challenges and Mitigation Strategies:
- Feature: Managing distributed teams and microservices complexity requires clear communication and tools.
- Details: Challenges include service discovery, data consistency, and team alignment. Mitigated with service meshes (e.g., Istio), event-driven architectures, and regular syncs. 20% of projects face initial coordination issues.
- Impact: Structured mitigation reduces risks by 25%.
- Example: A team uses Istio to resolve 90% of service discovery issues.
- Cellular Team Structure:
- Benefits of the Cellular Self-Organized Model:
- Agility: Autonomous teams deliver 30% faster than traditional structures.
- Scalability: Aligns with microservices, supporting 1M+ users.
- Ownership: End-to-end responsibility boosts team morale by 20%.
- Cost Efficiency: Offshore development in Vietnam ($20–$50/hour via InApps) saves 20–40% vs. U.S./EU ($80–$150/hour).
- Reliability: Independent deployments reduce system-wide failures by 30%.
- Challenges:
- Coordination: Distributed teams risk misalignment without clear governance.
- Complexity: Managing 10–50 microservices increases operational overhead.
- Skill Requirements: Teams need expertise in DDD, CI-CD, and Kubernetes.
- Cultural Shift: Transition to autonomy takes 2–3 months for traditional teams.
- Security Considerations:
- Encryption: Use TLS for inter-service APIs and AES-256 for data storage.
- Access Control: Implement RBAC and MFA for Kubernetes and Git repos.
- Compliance: Ensure GDPR, PCI-DSS, or SOC 2 for sensitive data.
- Example: InApps secures a microservices app with Istio and Snyk, meeting compliance standards.
- Use Cases:
- E-commerce: Independent teams manage cart, payment, and inventory microservices.
- Fintech: Secure transaction microservices with autonomous DevOps.
- SaaS: Scalable user and billing services for cloud platforms.
- Media: Real-time streaming microservices with low latency.
- Startups: Rapid MVPs with lean, self-organized teams.
- InApps Technology’s Role:
- Leading HCMC-based provider with 488 experts in microservices, DevOps, and Kubernetes.
- Offers cost-effective rates ($20–$50/hour) with Agile workflows using Jira, Slack, and Zoom (GMT+7).
- Specializes in microservices architectures, using Go, Node.js, Kubernetes, and tools like Istio, ArgoCD, and Prometheus.
- Example: InApps implements a cellular team model for a U.S. e-commerce client, reducing deployment time by 40%.
- Recommendations:
- Adopt cellular, self-organized teams for microservices to enhance agility and ownership.
- Align team boundaries with DDD and use service meshes for scalability.
- Implement CI-CD and observability tools for reliable, rapid deployments.
- Partner with InApps Technology for cost-effective microservices solutions, leveraging Vietnam’s talent pool
Read more about A Model for Managing Microservices in Cellular Self-Organized Teams – InApps at Wikipedia
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We’ve said it time and again — modern systems are complex. Now, it’s up for debate if Conway’s Law — where the technical systems’ design reflects the culture and communication of an organization — is desired or not, but there’s no doubt it is almost a constant. The risk of distributed systems is that everyone and everything is so distributed that there’s not a clear path of how things are connected and who is in charge of what code and for how long.
Paul Fremantle, co-founder of WSO2, told the audience of QCon London how he attempted to apply the simplifying models of math and physics to distributed systems. What he found was that the constantly changing complexity of distributed systems is much more akin to endlessly evolving cellular biology.
“Biology isn’t about trying to make everything super simple, but it’s about learning how to deal with complexity,” he said.
Both human bodies and modern distributed architecture are similarly complex systems.
Today we will share WSO2’s cell-based approach to microservices, where the code is reaggregated to reflect deaggregated, agile organizations.
What’s Keeping Enterprise Agility from Becoming a Reality?
“What’s happened over the last 50 years is we are disaggregating our systems — smaller and smaller, serverless and microservices,” Fremantle said.
He said the need to scale and move faster is driving this. However, he cited the 12th Annual State of Agile Report that, while 58 percent of organizations are using agile practices to support this, only four percent see their organization as a whole being agile to adapt to market conditions.
There seems to be a massive challenge to take the agility on teams and build a team of teams — like a scrum of Scrums — to take agility to the enterprise level.
Fremantle argues this difficulty to be agile on a united, cross-organizational front is because there is simply so much fragmentation. From APIs and endpoints to functional components to fragmentation at runtime and platforms to Kubernetes and microservices, we are moving farther and farther away from the hardware to orchestrate. Being cloud native inherently makes things more fragmented and complicated.
He continued to tout problems like how complex service-oriented architecture (SOA) processes — and the wrong tech stack in general — interrupt flows with excessive steps. And layered architecture makes it so you don’t have control over the things you need control over.
Fremantle argues that while we have decoupled a lot of the architecture, we’ve yet to decouple the organization. Referencing the Agile Manifesto’s focus on self-organizing teams, he said we need “composable” enterprises, too.
For him, this enterprise is made up of self-organizing teams that:
- Manage their own work
- Pull work
- Don’t need command and control
- Communicate effectively within teams
- Are not afraid to ask questions
- Evolve skills and capabilities constantly
- Have a servant leader or facilitator, not project managers and leads
Fremantle argues to limit teams to fewer than 10 members. With the formula below, he says if you have 10 people on a team, that’s already 45 connections. Eleven? Fifty-five connections. 20 people leads to 90 connections. Like with software, these many interconnected pieces make things really complicated, leading to relational loss.
n(n-1)
______
2
But once your organizational structure looks like this, how do you make sure the tech reflects it? (Also Read: Microservices: Terribly Named, Ambiguously Defined)
How Conway’s Law Can Offer More Control and Visibility into Your Stack
Fremantle offers APIs as natural boundaries, as they come with:
- Expected, required authentication
- Authorization
- Rate limiting and throttling
- Analytics and observability
- An assumption that others will use it:
- Developer-friendly portals, like SDKs, samples, and forums
- Developer-friendly governance, like versioning and depreciation notifications
A lot of people are putting sets of microservices behind API gateways that are providing more version control. But remember that you need to know who is using your APIs and what they are using them for, he said.
He analogizes that the control plane acts as a biological nervous system, while the data plane acts like the circulatory system. He also points out that nowadays there is no brownfield versus greenfield development — only both.
“We have our core systems in the brownfield and disaggregated and microservices in greenfield. Most people are putting in some kind of API platform, some way of isolating the backend systems from the services, and that gives us the potential to strangle away parts of the architecture.”
If one team of 10 devs is in charge of 200 microservices, no one could know all of them, but there could be collective knowledge. With this in mind, Fremantle argues that 90 percent of microservices in any deployment should not be visible outside the team to anyone who deploys it. Otherwise, someone else other than who built the service makes a change and everything breaks.
“We need governance and boundaries,” Fremantle said. “[It] allows you to keep your agility in your team and lets you be self-organized.”
He continued that we need to reaggregate those microservices — not all the way back to monoliths, but into something that is owned by a team.
He shared the following time-lapse video of sponge reaggregation to illustrate what he calls a natural reaggregation of microservices.
“APIs enable the boundaries, and the boundaries enable self-organizing teams.” — Paul Fremantle, WSO2
Continuing the metaphor, he said there should be stateful and stateless cells, some wrapping legacy stuff, and teams figuring out how to categorize these cells or groups of microservices.
At WSO2, as an API management system, they are looking to mimic this cellular reaggregation technologically with tools and systems. They are attempting to automatically visualize the organization of Kubernetes and microservices. (Also Read: Miniservices: A Realistic Alternative to Microservices)
A Cell Acts Like a Higher Level of Abstraction
The WSO2 Methodology for Agile says just about every new application involves integration across an exploding set of endpoints.
“Integration must learn from code to become immutable, type safe, testable, continuously built and deployed so they are more robust, resilient and above all — agile,” reads the paper.
It becomes a modernization of Conway’s Law for organizations, founded in continuous improvement:
- For both people and process the foundation is the culture of an organization.
- For technology the foundation is the architecture designed and implemented by the organization.
“We need a higher level abstraction — and that’s really what a cell is,” Fremantle said.
With this in mind, Fremantle offers three guidelines for microservices and tech in general to catch up to team agility:
- Have a clear global data and control plane — offering an API management platform to accomplish this
- Ensure teams offer clear boundaries — versioned APIs through the control planes
- Give teams freedom to evolve within these boundaries — like the cells around these groups of microservices
“Should we change human nature or write code? It’s easier to write code. We should be building our systems around Conway’s Law.” — Paul Fremantle, WSO2
He continued that everyone is on a journey toward agility, but integration agility has yet to catch up to the speed of project agility. In order to enable this integration agility, you must reaggregate code with a cellular structure to reflect the self-organizing teams who then are in charge of measuring the health of each team’s cell.
Continuing with this theme of restructuring your code around your teams, he said it’s about recoupling decoupled components into new agile teams within the flow of DevOps, cloud infrastructure and intracell communication, making sure that every agile step inside the cell is versioned and behind a gateway at the boundary.
“Biological systems have evolved into complexity. And what I think is really interesting is enterprise systems have evolved into complexity,” Fremantle said.
Read more about this cell-based restructuring here.
WSO2 is a sponsor of InApps.
Source: InApps.net
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