Traditionally, a tug of war has existed between service reliability and engineering velocity. Increasing speed to fuel product innovation has meant making tradeoffs in reliability.

Netflix standardizes common functionality, like service discovery, configuration, metrics, logging, and RPC across services. This frees teams to focus on the unique business value of their service. It also enables us to evolve and maintain platform components independently from individual services.

...

Discussion of microservice architectures often emphasizes the transition from monolith to microservices. No less important, though, is the strategy for successfully evolving a microservice-based architecture over time. Change is inevitable, and assumptions made when microservice boundaries were initially drafted may no longer hold. Since changes at this stage often have real consequences, preventing architectural drift and the associated disorganization of services and responsibilities...