The tradeoff between building more features on existing platforms vs. building more new individual services is always a complex decision. Let’s look at the pros and cons of each.
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PLATFORMS vs. SERVICES vs. INCREMENTAL CHANGE
- Platforms deliver a broad set of horizontal or vertical services
- Services tend to be focused on individual capabilities
- Features can be added to either, but where to add the feature?
- Services could be built on top of each other, but then is it a feature or a service?
DO YOU REALLY HAVE TO MAINTAIN A SERVICE FOREVER?
- Should you ever deprecate a service (e.g. turn it off, not be backwards compatible)?
- Can you leave the service “on” if nobody is using it?
- When do you decide to build a new service instead of just extending or improving another one?
- Do you have to create tools to migrate from one service to another?
- Do you have to create interoperability from one service to another?
- At what point have you added too many features to a platform (or service) to where the market (or internal customers) think that it’s too heavy - even when features don’t have to be used?
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