On this episode of Modern Digital Business, we dive into the world of ModernOps and talk STOSA (Single Team Oriented Service Architecture) with Beth Long.

This is part 1 of a two part discussion with Beth Long, an operations manager for New Relic, and Jeli.io. She is passionate about the concept of STOSA, which was first introduced in Lee Atchison's highly popular book, Architecting for Scale.

Lee and Beth switch roles for a bit, with Beth interviewing Lee on these and related topics.

Clips/Quotes

"Stosa: Stosa or single team oriented service Architecture is an important guiding principle for organizations that have development teams that own and manage applications that are composed of multiple services."

— Lee Atchison 00:00:00

Accountability and Ownership in Service-Based Architectures: "Each service needs to have a team that owns that service 100%, all aspects of that service. And it's a one to end relationship...but each of those services has exactly one team owner...that ownership has to be well understood throughout the organization, well known, well documented..."

— Lee Atchison 00:03:30

The Impact of Clear Visibility on Company Culture: "And that kind of culture tends to arise when there's confusion and frustration. And that's a byproduct of not knowing where the problems are and not understanding. And so when you have that clear visibility, you can reduce that tendency because now you know what's happening and where and why, and you can actually get traction on the problem."

— Beth Long 00:12:33

The Challenges of Meeting SLAs in Cloud Services: "If I had a requirement that I couldn't meet with my dependencies requirements, it was my responsibility to get creative, to find a solution. Whether that was caching running instances to attach later or whatever it was, it was my responsibility to solve that problem. I could do that by getting creative. I could do that by negotiating with my partners to have better or different SLAs available to me."

— Lee Atchison 00:13:16

Ownership and Boundaries: "If an organization has a microservices architecture and the boundaries have become fuzzy over time, they should be cautious when dividing up ownership and making it a single team. There are rules of thumb that they can think about to avoid complications."

— Beth Long 00:17:36

"Shared Tooling and Service Responsibility: Even though those teams own services that are shared in terms of their usage, but they still own a service and they're still responsible for that service and they're still responsible."

— Beth Long 00:23:02

Management Attitudes Towards Internal Customers: "There's this kind of this attitude that if we're doing work for our internal customers, like, we should be doing as little of that as possible. And that always frustrated me because I thought, no, this is the inner workings of a body."

— Beth Long 00:24:49

"Stosa and the Human Body: There's so many systems that have to work together and they're self-dependent on each other for them to work together."

— Lee Atchison 00:25:35

Questions and Answers

1. What is STOSA?

Answer: STOSA stands for Single Team Oriented Service Architecture. It is a management model for organizations with development teams that manage applications composed of multiple services.

2. What are the key principles of STOSA?

Answer: The key principles of STOSA include ownership, self-contained services, clear APIs and SLAs, accountability, efficient problem resolution, and optimization of scalability and availability for cloud-native applications.

3. How does STOSA support internal customers?

Answer: STOSA emphasizes actively supporting internal customers by assigning development teams to specific services and making them responsible for all aspects of managing those services, from development to deployment to problem-solving.

4. How does STOSA handle service failures and accountability?

Answer: STOSA emphasizes individual responsibility for services, even if dependencies are failing. It encourages individuals to identify the problem's source, establish SLAs, and proactively fix issues to meet customer expectations.

5. Are shared services allowed in STOSA?

Answer: Shared services are acceptable in STOSA, but the service owner remains responsible for the deployment outcome. They can subcontract deployment work to shared teams, but they are still accountable.

6. How does STOSA handle ownership of shared tools?

Answer: In STOSA, the responsibility for a useful shared tool lies with the tool owner. Central teams can exist and provide useful tools, but service owners retain ownership and responsible metrics should reflect customer satisfaction.

7. What is the role of internal customers in STOSA?

Answer: Internal customers are considered equally important as external customers in STOSA. Meeting the needs of internal customers is crucial, as they play a significant role in meeting the needs of external customers.

8. How does STOSA promote organizational scalability and availability?

Answer: STOSA aims to create an organization that can scale without availability, deployment, and scaling issues. It provides guiding principles and practical ideas to achieve this goal.

9. How did the speaker handle SLA issues with Elastic Beanstalk?

Answer: The speaker faced SLA challenges with Elastic Beanstalk due to the performance of underlying systems. They implemented creative solutions, such as using a pool of pre-running EC2 instances, caching, and negotiating with partners, to meet SLAs.

10. Where can listeners find more information about STOSA?

Answer: Listeners can visit stosa.org to explore the criteria and details of the STOSA philosophy. They can also find books, courses, and articles on the speaker's website for further learning.



Today on Modern Digital Business

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Useful Links

• STOSA - Single Team Oriented Service Architecture
• Architecting for Scale, 2nd Edition, O’Reilly Media

About Lee

Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, public speaker, and recognized thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His most recent book,