Weekly Digest #80

Articles

Trunk and Branches Model

Rules of scaling infrastructure organization

• Rule One: You must maintain service qualtiy high enough that your leadership team doesn’t throw you out
• Rule Two: You must maintain a sizable investment budget to prevent exponential problems from sinking your organization
• Corollary One: If morale is too low, service quality and investment budget will both collapse (as folks leave with the essential context)
• Corollary Two: If your budget is too high, it’ll get compressed (which makes everything else much harder)

Trunk and Branches Model.

You start with a “trunk team” that is effectively your original infrastructure team. The trunk is responsible for absolutely everything that other teams expect from infrastructure, and might be called something like “Infra Eng,” “Platform Eng,” or “Core Infra.”

As the team grows, you identify a particularly valuable narrow subset of the work. Valuable here means one of three things:

1. it’s an exponential problem that will overrun your entire organization if you don’t solve it soon; for example, test or build instability accelerating as you hire more engineers
2. It’s a recurring fire that is…