Since we last mentioned tailored service templates, we've seen a broader adoption of the pattern to help pave the road for organizations moving to microservices. With constant advances in observability tooling, container orchestration and service mesh sidecars, a template provides sensible defaults to bootstrap a new service, removing a great deal of setup needed to make the service work well with the surrounding infrastructure. We've had success applying product management principles to tailored service templates, treating internal developers as customers and making it easier for them to push code to production and operate it with appropriate observability. This has the added benefit of acting as a lightweight governance mechanism to centralize default technical decisions.
We see multiple organizations creating a Tailored Service Template which can be used to quickly seed new services, pre-configured to operate within that organization's production environment. The template contains a default set of decisions such as web frameworks, logging, monitoring, build, packaging, and deployment approaches. This is a very useful technique for encouraging collaborative evolution while retaining lightweight governance.
