Microservices: Up and Running

Chapter 11. Managing Change

We have now built a microservices system that is optimized to reduce change costs. We’ve done it quite quickly and with a great variety of tools, technologies, and repositories. In this chapter, we’ll take a step back and consider the system we’ve built from the perspective of change. We’ll explore what change looks like for the system we’ve built. We’ll take a look at the typical kinds of change you’ll need to do and the patterns and methods that work well to support them.

Change is an important factor because of the impact it has. Poorly designed software can end up costing organizations a lot of pain. As we highlighted in Chapter 1, one of the benefits of a microservices system is that it makes change faster and safer.

Also, change will always have a cost. In a software system, that cost is a combination of time, money, and impact to people. To get the most out of our microservices system, we need to minimize change cost and make changes that have the greatest impact. Reducing the cost of change gives all of our teams more freedom to experiment, optimize, and improve. Focusing change activities gives us better results from a finite change budget.

Let’s start by getting a better understanding of the kinds of changes we can expect in a microservices system and the best way to make decisions about change.

Changes in a Microservices System

In a microservices system, change should be a feature, not a problem or a bug. That means you should be able to ...