Description

This curriculum spans the technical, operational, and organizational dimensions of microservices adoption, comparable in scope to a multi-workshop architecture engagement supporting the redesign of a cloud-native platform across distributed teams.

Module 1: Strategic Alignment of Microservices with Business Capabilities

Decide which business domains justify microservice decomposition based on transaction volume, team ownership, and failure impact analysis.
Map existing monolithic functions to bounded contexts using event storming sessions with domain experts and product managers.
Establish service ownership models that align with organizational structure, including cross-functional team responsibilities and escalation paths.
Negotiate SLAs between service teams for latency, availability, and data consistency requirements during capability handoffs.
Balance reuse versus duplication by determining whether shared logic should be embedded in services or exposed via shared libraries.
Define criteria for service retirement, including backward compatibility windows and consumer deprecation notifications.

Module 2: Cloud Infrastructure Design for Microservice Deployment

Select cloud regions and availability zones based on data residency laws, user proximity, and inter-service communication latency.
Configure VPCs and subnets to isolate microservices by security classification and operational risk profile.
Implement infrastructure-as-code templates for consistent service deployment across environments using Terraform or CloudFormation.
Choose between serverless (e.g., AWS Lambda) and containerized (e.g., EKS, GKE) hosting based on cold start tolerance and resource predictability.
Design persistent storage strategies per service, including decisions on managed databases, read replicas, and cross-region backups.
Enforce network policies using service mesh sidecars or network security groups to restrict inter-service communication.

Module 3: Service Design, Decomposition, and API Contracts

Determine service granularity by analyzing transactional consistency boundaries and deployment frequency requirements.
Define API contracts using OpenAPI or gRPC protobuf with versioning strategies that support backward compatibility.
Implement contract testing pipelines to validate consumer-provider compatibility before deployment.
Choose synchronous (REST/gRPC) versus asynchronous (message queues) communication based on user experience and fault tolerance needs.
Design idempotency mechanisms for critical operations to handle retry scenarios in unreliable networks.
Document data ownership and access patterns to prevent unauthorized cross-service data queries.

Module 4: Data Management and Distributed Consistency

Apply database-per-service pattern and manage eventual consistency using event sourcing or outbox pattern.
Implement distributed transaction compensation logic using sagas for business processes spanning multiple services.
Select message brokers (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ) based on throughput, ordering guarantees, and replay requirements.
Design event schema evolution strategies to support backward and forward compatibility in message payloads.
Handle data migration during service splits using dual writing and shadow reads with validation checks.
Enforce data retention and deletion policies across services to comply with privacy regulations like GDPR.

Module 5: Observability, Monitoring, and Incident Response

Instrument services with structured logging, distributed tracing, and metrics collection using OpenTelemetry standards.
Configure alerting thresholds based on business KPIs rather than infrastructure metrics alone (e.g., order failure rate vs. CPU usage).
Correlate logs, traces, and metrics using a shared context ID propagated across service boundaries.
Establish on-call rotations and incident response playbooks specific to each critical microservice.
Conduct blameless postmortems for outages involving multiple services to identify systemic gaps.
Limit log and trace data retention based on cost, compliance, and forensic investigation needs.

Module 6: Security and Identity Management Across Services

Enforce service-to-service authentication using short-lived tokens or mTLS managed by a centralized identity provider.
Implement role-based and attribute-based access control at the API gateway and service level.
Centralize secrets management using tools like HashiCorp Vault or cloud-native secret stores with audit logging.
Validate and sanitize all inbound payloads to prevent injection attacks, especially in public-facing APIs.
Conduct regular security audits of third-party dependencies used across microservices.
Define data classification levels and encrypt sensitive data in transit and at rest based on risk tier.

Module 7: CI/CD Pipelines and Deployment Governance

Design independent deployment pipelines per service with automated testing and approval gates for production promotion.
Implement canary deployments with traffic shifting and automated rollback based on health metrics.
Enforce static code analysis and container vulnerability scanning in every build pipeline.
Coordinate database schema changes with deployment timelines using versioned migration scripts.
Manage feature toggles to decouple deployment from release, enabling controlled rollouts and A/B testing.
Track deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate to measure and improve team delivery performance.

Module 8: Organizational Scaling and Operational Sustainability

Define service ownership levels (e.g., Level 1–3 support) and document runbooks for common failure modes.
Standardize service templates and scaffolding tools to reduce onboarding time for new teams.
Establish platform teams to manage shared infrastructure, reducing cognitive load on service teams.
Measure and optimize cost per transaction across services to identify inefficiencies in resource allocation.
Conduct regular architecture review boards to evaluate new service proposals and enforce design standards.
Rotate engineers across services to prevent knowledge silos and promote collective code ownership.