Porsche Drive – Microservices gone wrong

What is the recipe of turning a mobility product platform vision into an expensive and hardly maintainable piece of software?
1. Try to share all capabilities between different products.
2. Do not have a proper domain cut between your capabilities.
3. Have a different understanding what functionality to expect from a third party domain.
4. Last but not least, only share rest APIs.

Within this talk I will show you how we started with a great product vision and ended up with entity services and complex frontend monoliths. I will show you when and how we changed the course and what further challenges we have on our long journey towards a more maintainable and cleaner architecture.

The key aspect is the concept of “domain sharing”, identifying proper domain boundaries, finding compromises and implementing those results into a common platform. We figured out that not all capabilities between similar products can and should be shared. But those capabilities that fit for a common implementation, should be taken as an entire piece of software and not be ripped apart. On a business layer this means to have a common language and understanding what to expect from our domains. On a technical layer it requires to have a customizable modular frontend and a backend environment with loosely coupled microservices.