Comparison
Cognitive loadvsSelf-service platform
Cognitive load
the team owns nine services and can explain four of them.
The total amount a team must hold in its head to do its work — domains, systems, tools, on-call surface. Treating it as a budget is the most useful team-sizing idea of the last decade, because it explains why adding one more service to a team can halve its throughput. It is also the strongest argument available against a proposed split or acquisition of ownership: not that the work is too much, but that the understanding required is.
Full entry →Self-service platform
you got a database, a queue and a domain name by opening a pull request instead of by waiting four days for a ticket.
Letting engineers provision and change infrastructure themselves within guardrails, rather than through a request queue. It removes the platform team from the critical path of every change, which is what makes it scale, and it depends entirely on the guardrails being real — policy, quotas, defaults and audit. Self-service without guardrails is not a platform, it is an unbounded permission grant.
Full entry →