Microservice dependency mapping: why your service catalog isn't enough
A service catalog tells you what services exist. Dependency mapping tells you what happens when one of them changes. The difference matters at 2am.
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Platform engineering
in practice.
Articles on dependency management, breaking change strategies, CI/CD risk scoring, and how modern teams run microservice platforms.
Deploy risk scoring for platform teams: a practical framework
Not all deploys carry equal risk. A risk score model that understands your dependency topology tells you which PRs need extra eyes before they merge.
Writing better postmortems for downstream cascade failures
Cascade incidents are different. The triggering service isn't always where the impact lands. Here's how to structure the postmortem when the source and the damage are two different teams.
Onboarding engineers onto a 80-service platform without losing them
The hardest part of onboarding to a large microservice platform isn't the code — it's understanding who owns what and what breaks what. A dependency graph is a better onboarding artifact than a Confluence page.
Distributed service ownership: when the catalog isn't enough
Ownership models break down at scale. A CODEOWNERS file works at 10 services. At 80, you need something that understands contracts, not just files.
Shift-left dependency analysis: catching breaking changes in review, not production
The cost of a breaking change scales exponentially with how late you catch it. Catching it in a PR review is 10x cheaper than catching it in production.