Building Services That Scale Part 2 of Beyond the Code: Designing Services That Stand the Test of Time When we hear the word service, it sounds simple, almost obvious. In practice, defining what a service is can be surprisingly nuanced. A service isn’t just code running on a server. It isn’t interchangeable with a web or a mobile application. This means a service is more than just code, it’s a self contained piece of functionality with clear boundaries, responsibilities, and relationships to the rest of the system. The term service is overloaded in the world of software engineering. For example, we’re not talking about the object oriented programming concept where a class is named Service to encapsulate business logic. How we define a service shapes everything that follows. The architecture choices, scalability, resilience, and even team structure. Here we’ll explore what makes a service distinct, why it usually works behind the scenes without a user int...