Build a Battle Plan to Kickstart Your Architecture Evolution

A military general needs a clear battle plan to help mobilize thousands of troops in strategic ways to flank enemy troops, disrupt supply lines and conquer the battlefield. To build a battle plan, having accurate knowledge of the terrain, enemy troops, enemy defenses, and key targets are critical. With this critical information, the general can strategize to flank enemy troops, disrupt supply lines, capture key targets, and ultimately conquer the battlefield.

Mapping out your service ecosystem like a military general can be a key artifact to help clearly communicate across an engineering team and align in strategic directions. This talk will show how some simple mapping and diagramming techniques that can be applied to your architecture. These techniques will help show a current and future state of your services, where key investments are needed, where technical debt is buried, or where your teams need to focus. Just like a general that needs to mobilize thousands of troops in the right direction, these concepts can help spread awareness, align teams strategically, and empower teams to move faster towards the future.

This talk doesn't focus on visualizing services from an operational perspective (like snazzy interactive flow graphs in Visceral, X-Ray, or Istio), but instead, this talk focuses on how to represent a logical view of services to show intent, direction, and impact. The impact of these concepts on large technology teams can help transform culture and empower greater collaboration, service reuse, and consistency. For smaller technology teams, these concepts can be used to help your teams visualize their services and plan for the future as well as interact with other stakeholders in a more consistent way.

Speaker: Jason Montgomery

Food and Beverages Provided.