Consistency Catalyst: The story of Paddle's in house microservice toolkit- George Wilson, Paddle

Building an in-house microservices toolkit helped standardize service development and improved productivity at Paddle, while maintaining team independence

Key components of their toolkit included:

• Service templates and boilerplate code
• Standardized API specs and JSON schemas
• Authentication/authorization libraries
• Consistent testing approaches
• Unified observability and monitoring

Success factors for toolkit adoption:

• Bottom-up approach vs top-down mandates
• Making adoption easy with good documentation
• Proving value through early adopter teams
• Getting engineer buy-in and feedback
• Having executive champion support

Measuring success through:

• Developer productivity metrics
• Service deployment frequency
• Code quality and consistency scores
• Engineer feedback and satisfaction
• Reduced time to production for new services

Challenges and lessons learned:

• Balance between standardization and team autonomy
• Cost of maintaining custom toolkit
• Need for ongoing investment and updates
• Importance of culture change
• Not forcing adoption but making it attractive

Benefits realized:

• Improved developer onboarding
• Easier cross-team collaboration
• More consistent APIs and interfaces
• Reduced technical debt
• Faster service development lifecycle

Key recommendations:

• Start with common problems across teams
• Focus on developer experience
• Build incrementally based on feedback
• Leverage existing open source where possible
• Document and share wins to drive adoption