Abstract
Successfully developed and launched software spends the vast majority of its lifecycle in a state where it needs maintenance and support. In an environment where the number of services can easily outnumber the number of developers in your engineering organization, it is business-critical that operational support runs efficiently and effectively, without impacting the productivity and retention of your engineering staff.
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Notes
- 1.
While it is very hard to give meaningful guidance about optimal team sizes or the best number of services per team developer, in our experience the sweet spot most successful microservices companies choose is between 5 and 8 developers per team. If automation is advanced in an organization, then the ratio of microservices per team member (or developer) does not have a clear upper bound. Running multiple services per developer is definitely possible if development and deployment processes are streamlined.
- 2.
Jon Daniel, "Ethical and Sustainable On-Call,” August 13 2015, DevOpsDays Pittsburgh; An overview of Jon's inspirational talk, including slides and a link to a video recording of the talk, can be found on his personal blog at: https://chronicbuildfailure.co/ethical-and-sustainable-on-call-c0075e03a7b
- 3.
Automatic ticket creation is hard to get right, as often this leads to many duplicated or similar trouble tickets that are rooted in the same underlying issue. An on-call person will then spend a lot of time on de-duplication and other unnecessary ticket management tasks.
- 4.
We will discuss properties of useful trouble ticketing system later in this chapter.
- 5.
We will talk in more detail in later subsections about dashboards, SOPs, and post-mortems.
- 6.
See Steve Freeman's blog post "Bad code isn't Technical Debt, it's an unhedged Call Option" (July 23 2010) for a more detailed explanation of this argument; http://higherorderlogic.com/2010/07/bad-code-isnt-technical-debt-its-an-unhedged-call-option/
- 7.
The “Defining and advertising team policy” section later in this chapter lays out points to address in a policy for severity assessment and issue prioritization.
- 8.
“Comparison of issue-tracking systems” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_systems
- 9.
See “5 Whys,” on Wikipedia, for more details about the origin and history of this technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys
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© 2016 Cloves Carneiro Jr. and Tim Schmelmer
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Carneiro, C., Schmelmer, T. (2016). Operational Excellence with Microservices. In: Microservices From Day One. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-1937-9_14
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