ModernOps: Talking STOSA with Beth Long, Part 2

On this episode of Modern Digital Business, host Lee Atchison continues his conversation with guest Beth Long about Stosa, or single team-oriented service architecture. In this episode, they delve into the makeup of healthy Stosa organizations and provide actionable insights and recommendations for business technology leaders and small business innovators in the digital business revolution.

They discuss the importance of defining service boundaries and how data is considered part of the service in the Stosa model. They emphasize the need for services to own their data and for data sharing to occur through documented APIs. They also highlight the challenges of scaling and separating services when a central database is still used by many service companies.

They explore the mindset shift from development teams to product teams and how reorganizing responsibilities based on business requirements can help determine the needed skill sets. They stress the value of allowing individual teams to make decisions, even if they may seem suboptimal globally, and the importance of assessing whether teams have the necessary tools to fulfill their business responsibilities.

Lee & Beth emphasize the need to strike a balance between optimization at the organizational level and individual service level and draw parallels to microeconomics and macroeconomics. They view having different technology choices among teams as an opportunity for solution dynamics and influence.

They also tackle how to prepare a small organization for future growth and division, providing insights on thinking of oneself as a big company and building applications with multiple services and connections in mind from the start.

Key Topics

Topics covered in this audio session:

- Introduction to STOSA (single team-oriented service architecture)

- Makeup of healthy STOSA organizations

- Defining service boundaries in separation service models

- Data as part of the service in STOSA and Goldilocks models

- Ownership and sharing of data through documented APIs

- Challenges with central databases in scaling and separating services

- Importance of smaller, younger companies setting up data systems early on

- The right skill set within an organization

- Change in mindset from development teams to product teams

- Reorganizing responsibilities based on business requirements

- Autonomy and hiring decisions for teams

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, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee has been widely quoted in multiple technology publications, including InfoWorld, Diginomica, IT Brief, Programmable Web, CIO Review, and DZone, and has been a featured speaker at events across the globe.

Take a look at Lee's many books, courses, and articles by going to leeatchison.com.

Looking to modernize your application organization?

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