Beyond Microservices: Building Systems That Align Architecture, Teams, and Flow
Moon, Dongsun
Synopsis "Beyond Microservices: Building Systems That Align Architecture, Teams, and Flow"
The microservices migration shipped on time. Six months later, a two-line change still takes three teams and a two-week approval chain. The dashboards are green. Everything is slower. That gap is where this book lives. It is written for software engineers, architects, engineering managers, and SREs who have shipped distributed systems, sat through the postmortems, and waited for an approval chain longer than the work itself. The coupling didn't disappear when you split the services. It moved into Slack threads, shared pipelines, and the calendars of people who have to agree before anything ships. Conway's Law doesn't care how clean your service graph looks. Splitting code without splitting ownership produces a distributed monolith with worse latency and the same bottleneck. This book gives you the instruments to close that gap. Team APIs turn ownership from a vague convention into a contract your delivery pipelines can check. When another team calls your API, they call your SLOs and on-call practices along with your endpoints. Composite SLOs give engineering and the business a shared language for reliability across latency, quality, cost, and responsibility, one that can actually halt a release when the budget burns. Decision Sunsets keep yesterday's good architectural choices from hardening into today's invisible constraints. What was right at six engineers may be wrong at sixty. Release ≠ Deploy separates moving bits from exposing functionality. During an error budget burn, you can still deploy a hotfix without releasing new features. The fine-grained control is what makes safe speed possible. Around these are EventStorming, Consistency Profiles, Error Budget Policies, blameless postmortems with CAPA tracking, kill switches as policy-as-code, and Paved Roads operated as products. Six appendices carry the templates, YAML schemas, and CI gates ready for adoption. You'll stop debating how many services you should have and start naming the coordination tax you're already paying. Then you'll reduce it, week by week, with measurements your CFO and your on-call rotation both recognize. The microservices conversation has been stuck for a decade between cargo-cult adoption and reactionary monolith nostalgia. Both miss the point. The real question was never how small your services should be. It was how your organization shapes what those services can actually do.
