8 parts · 8 chapters
Big-company Backend
The backend mirror of the Big-company Frontend course: what changes when hundreds of engineers and thousands of services share one production. Most of the hard problems stop being technical alone: who owns this, who must agree, and how a change reaches every team.
Eight parts: service ownership and catalogues (Backstage); RFCs and design review; API and schema governance; migrations at scale with codemods and tracking; deprecations people actually finish; on-call culture; platform teams and paved roads; and cross-team dependencies and planning.
ownershipEvery service, topic, table and alert has a named owning team.
decisionsRFCs and design reviews that improve designs without blocking them.
governanceLinting and review for APIs and schemas, automated where possible.
migrationsChanging 400 services: automation, tracking and deadlines.
on-callSustainable rotations, good alerts, blameless reviews.
planningDependencies made visible early and negotiated honestly.
00
Service Ownership and Catalogues
Every component has an owner
1 ch · ~8 min01RFCs and Design Review
Writing it down first
1 ch · ~8 min02API and Schema Governance
Rules in CI, judgement in review
1 ch · ~8 min03Migrations at Scale
Automate, track, finish
1 ch · ~8 min04Deprecations People Actually Finish
Dates, signals, brownouts, deletion
1 ch · ~8 min05On-Call Culture
Sustainable rotations
1 ch · ~8 min06Platform Teams and Paved Roads
Make the right way the easy way
1 ch · ~8 min07Cross-Team Dependencies and Planning
Dependencies surface early or late, never not
1 ch · ~8 minBuilt on Backend Architecture and PlatformUses Backend Architecture for boundaries and Platformization for internal platforms; Merge Reviews covers the code-level counterpart.