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I think the context is pretty clear: microservices.

If it takes 10 people to manage one service, it is not a microservice by definition. It is more like a 10x-microservice or a macroservice.




It's not the number of people that are micro, it's the scope of the service... So what is the right level of manpower for a scoped service with unspecified operational demands? Unknowable.

The definition isn't small teams, per se, it's a small area of responsibility with singular focus. A lego block instead of duplo. That lends itself very well to small teams, but you could reasonably have 100 people working on a service and call it "micro".

Reason being: if those 100 people weren't working on their scoped 'microservice' they would be part of a much, much, much larger pool working on the shared 'product', 'platform', or 'service' that contains that exact same functionality, only without the clarity/scalability of application boundaries surrounding the individual service components.

That's not to say microservices are ideal, just that the size of "micro" is highly relative to ongoing operations.


While 10 is more than many recommend it's not that much more than Amazon's rule of < 7.


I suppose it depends if those 10 people are purely developers or include the other teams you'd need - monitoring, devops, etc. For a critical, high-performance microservice, I can easily see it needing the involvement of 2+ devs (at least one senior), product owner, project manager, QA, devops, monitoring, etc.




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