The number of services running in WMF production has been steadily increasing lately: OCG, Mathoid, Citoid, Parsoid, RESTBase, Graphoid, Maps, MobileApps, etc. The Services team does a fair amount of mentoring other teams during the initial development and deployment process.
=== Problem ===
Developers have found it easy to develop new services and implement changes iteratively. However, service ownership and maintenance currently falls on Services //by default//, which has several drawbacks:
- **Scalability**. The team has 4 members which work in various areas. Hence, maintaining the //status quo// in ownership and maintenance while increasing the number of deployed services will not be feasible.
- **Feature know-how**. Having a feature being implemented as a service does not mean that the Services team is capable of implementing urgently-needed changes to running software.
=== Discussion ===
Let's try to find solutions to the following problems:
# Re-evaluate the ownership status of the deployed services
# How can services be efficiently //owned// by teams lacking back-end / production knowledge?
# What is the long-term strategy for services in production? What happens to services when their owners leave / give up / etc?