Microservices Platforms: When Team Topologies Meets Microservices Patterns

QCONSF 2025 presentation

When many teams work on a large, complex application, the microservice architecture potentially enables them to work independently and deliver a continuous stream of changes. Yet, there's a risk that those teams become burdened by needing to apply numerous patterns from the microservice architecture pattern language. Instead of writing domain logic, they must spend their time writing plumbing code and dealing with infrastructure. This overhead ultimately slows feature delivery, undermining the primary goals of adopting a microservice architecture.

In this talk, I explain how to solve this problem by applying the Team Topologies' concept of a platform, which reduces the workload for teams and enables them to focus on domain logic. You will learn how this platform approach directly tackles the most common challenges of implementing the microservice pattern language. I will then describe several kinds of platforms and the key capabilities they provide to free development teams from this implementation burden.

Transcript

1. Microservices platforms: when team topologies meets microservices patterns Chris Richardson Founder of Eventuate.io Founder of the original CloudFoundry.com Author of POJOs in Action and Microservices Patterns chris@chrisrichardson.net http://adopt.microservices.io https://www.linkedin.com/in/pojos Copyright © 2025. Chris Richardson Consulting, Inc. All rights reserved
2. Presentation goal Accelerating development of microservices by using Team Topologies Platform groups
3. @crichardson About Chris http://adopt.microservices.io
4. About Chris https://chrisrichardson.net/
5. Microservices Platforms: why?
6. Fast fl ow for business succe$$ in today’s VUCA world Development Production Continuous stream of small changes, many times a day Continuous feedback and learning Users IT
7. Organization: Enables Enables Process: Principles and practices for fast fl ow Organizational patterns for fast fl ow Fast fl ow success triangle Fast fl ow architecture: (at scale)
8. Team topologies: organizational patterns and principles for fast fl ow
9. Cognitive overload: an obstacle to fast fl ow Reduces team performance Impacts mental health: stress, burnout. DevEx Work environment than minimizes interruptions, meaningful work, … Minimize - simplify environment, automate, good documentation, … Fast feedback from colleagues, tools, deployment pipeline, production, users, … Feedback Flow Cognitive load Great https://premium.microservices.io/microservices-rules-4-provide-a-great-developer-experience/
10. Microservice architecture: two or more components Production Deployment pipeline Service Repo Deployment pipeline Service Repo Deployment pipeline Service Repo Independently deployable Loosely coupled Service Service Service Some system operations span multiple services
11. Bene fi t of Microservices: enables independent stream-aligned teams
12. Challenge: Using microservices => numerous sub- issues to resolve https://microservices.io/patterns/microservices.html
13. Implementing patterns can be challenging
14. More than patterns…
15. … more than patterns
16. Solution: Use platforms owned by platform groups
17. About platform group(ing)s
18. Bene fi ts of platforms and platform groups
19. Microservices Platforms + Teams Applicability: organizations building multiple components
20. Microservices Platforms: simplifying service creation and maintenance
21. Each service needs extensive plumbing, build logic, …
23. Pattern: Service Template https://microservices.io/patterns/service-template.html
24. Drawback: plumbing evolves => update everywhere
25. Pattern: Service chassis https://microservices.io/patterns/microservice-chassis.html Release new version Use new version Use new version
26. Propagating service template changes to the services
27. Microservices Platforms: security
28. Security architecture: authentication and authorization…
29. …Security architecture: transport-level security
30. Security platform
31. Microservices Platforms: provisioning infrastructure services
32. Services need infrastructure services
33. Solution: Infrastructure services platform
34. Infrastructure orchestrator example: Crossplane
35. Microservices Platforms: understanding application behavior
36. The need for observability Essential for reliable deployments
37. An observable service
38. About observability patterns
39. Observability platform
40. Microservices Platforms: the path from laptop to production
41. Every service has a deployment pipeline
42. Provided by a build platform
43. Microservices Platforms: deployment platform
44. Build and deployment platforms: deployment pipeline and production environment
45. Deployment platform
46. Example: Kubernetes/GitOps based deployment
47. Microservices Platforms: how?
48. https://thenewstack.io/why-up-to-70-of-platform-engineering-teams-fail-to-deliver- impact/
49. Platforms: A way to avoid addressing dif fi cult people/customer problems by diving into the in fi nity pool of technology
50. Services- fi rst, platforms-later Focus on the services, not the platforms De fi ne/evolve platforms to solve actual problems that affect multiple teams https://microservices.io/post/antipatterns/2019/04/30/antipattern-focus-on-technology.html
51. @crichardson Aim for the Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP) “Most internal platforms become bloated monstrosities that slow teams down rather than accelerate progress. The TVP approach creates platforms that provide just enough capability without unnecessary complexity. A good platform should make stream-aligned teams move faster, not generate more dependencies to manage.” WARNING ! https://teamtopologies.com/key-concepts
52. Adopt a customer-focused mindset
53. Summary: microservices require platforms…
54. …Summary: microservices platforms needed
55. Summary: apply DRY to improve maintainability Develop reusable components Libraries and frameworks Custom build tool plugins Custom CI/CD components IaC modules: Helm Library charts, … … Avoid copy/paste = code generation, large templates Provide tooling to automate updates of template instances
56. Summary: focus on the services - not technology • De fi ne platform groups that help service teams • Build minimal platforms (TVPs) that solve actual problems Focus on the services
57. chris@chrisrichardson.net http://adopt.microservices.io Questions? https://www.linkedin.com/in/pojos