How the Financial Times scaled from 12 to 30,000 releases a year

How can a team reap maximum benefits from building with microservices? 

Learn from Sarah Wells, an Independent Tech Consultant and Author, worked for the Financial Times for 11 years. In her time, they scaled from 12 releases each year to over 30,000 — all thanks to microservices (and a lot of engineering enablement work). 

Admittedly, microservices are not a fix-all solution for every business. Yet, if you find your company struggling to offer the capacity for countless engineers to complete projects, a microservice architecture may be the way to go. 

Adopting the use of microservices across an entire organization requires a new outlook for measuring metrics of success. A strong balance of concrete metrics and thorough feedback are key for ensuring progress.

The tipping point that led to the migration to microservices

At the point when Financial Times migrated to microservices, there were approximately 200 engineers across the organization, which meant many were often working on the system at the same time. 

To deploy any updates they were forced to make changes during low traffic times on weekends because any deploys resulted in downtime. This was manageable in the early days but as the team grew it became more difficult. The need for waiting was delaying projects — and, thus, progress.

Surprisingly, the push to migrate to microservices happened somewhat organically. 3 different teams that were working on new projects decided to use a microservices architecture and after finding success this pushed the entire engineering org to migrate. 

“I do not recommend everyone switch to microservices. It is crucial to ensure it will work for your specific organizational needs, and you have to learn independently,” Sarah says.

Engineering enablement team vs. platform team

Sarah created the Engineering Enablement team with the top priority always set on reducing the cognitive load for the product engineering team. While a platform team serves solely to build platforms, engineering enablement works to find ways to make their customers’ (or, the product engineers') lives easier. 

For instance, they found several individuals struggled with getting their pull requests pushed through in a timely manner — often waiting a full day or two before receiving a response. The Engineering Enablement team built a system to automate repetitive tasks, automatically approving those that need to be and sending others to the appropriate departments.

Feedback in a blameless culture

Sarah and her former department’s work aimed at reducing toil and removing boring tasks that hinder progress. 

The question still remained: are people using what they are building? 

The Engineering Enablement team needed more staff than they could have due to constraints. Instead of hiring additional employees, they pulled employees from product teams for three-month-long periods. 

These employees were able to not only make suggestions but also offer real feedback about the systems already in place. 

“You have to give people the opportunity to express they are not ready to support a specific system,” Sarah says.

By creating a culture that revolves around honest, well-articulated feedback, companies can thrive through microservices. Once, the entire team at the Financial Times awoke to learn the website in its entirety had essentially disappeared from the internet. 

With such a massive stressor in place, it may seem easy to push blame. Yet, each team member had the same question: what can we do to fix things so everything is okay again?

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Interested in learning more? In our conversation with Sarah, she discusses metric management, the value of visible team dashboards, culture building and more. Listen on Apple,, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player.

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