Microservices here are mostly fancy word for an API or an app consuming API or listening for events. At least in my department, we have a fair amount of legacy

Microservices here are mostly fancy word for an API or an app consuming API or listening for events. At least in my department, we have a fair amount of legacy code, coupled together, as the application and CMS grew over the years; we're now working on splitting things up, e.g. reports don't need to be part of the same code as CMS. Scheduled jobs for grabbing 3rd party feeds can be separated into its own app. Any significant part of the system is eventually going to be living on its own - so that deploying one part shouldn't break others; running a bad query on our reporting DB will not affect production DB etc. I guess the downside of this approach is having to manage overhead of each of these services (setting up puppet, nginx, caching etc.); majority of our apps live in a shared puppet config so it's not too difficult to spin up a new box in EC2 and apply puppet to it, but also as you grow bigger you might want to split out these configurations (different teams = different needs) or have a curated/moderated central configuration (that's sort of the way we have it now). Regarding communication between services, not sure exactly what you mean, usually when we split something out of existing system, the legacy code just makes a call to this new external service to get the data. Regarding Developer Anarchy.. no of course we're not just developers :) Each dev team works with designers, marketing and commercial people. Priorities/objectives come from business people and we just help them figure out how to reach their goals and inform them on possibilities from technical side. Day to day however, we're mostly left to our own, so it's pretty great. We don't have project managers in a typical sense, we decide our timelines and tools. I haven't seen that video yet, it's also before my time here (I've been here 1.5 year), but either way it's very developer friendly environment with plenty of freedom. Ping me on Skype (tomasz-tomczyk) or email if you'd like to know anything more.