Topic 119

Service Boundaries

A product team is splitting a growing software platform into services. The system currently handles authentication, billing, notifications, reporting, and user profile management in a single codebase. Traffic is increasing, a few components need independent scaling, and several teams are starting to work in parallel. The goal is to improve delivery speed and operational resilience without introducing excessive complexity, latency, or data consistency problems. Constraints include a small platform engineering team, limited budget for new infrastructure, existing database schemas that are hard to change, and a requirement to keep downtime minimal during migration. The main tradeoff is whether to optimize for rapid decomposition, strong transactional consistency, simpler operations, or long-term organizational autonomy.