Service Ownership

Service Ownership assigns clear accountability for a service across its lifecycle. Owners are responsible not only for implementation, but also for architecture, documentation, security, reliability, cost, support, deprecation, and consumer communication.

Effective ownership normally includes:

• A named owning team and escalation route.
• A service catalog entry and current documentation.
• Operational dashboards, alerts, runbooks, and SLOs.
• Dependency and consumer visibility.
• Versioning, migration, and retirement policies.

Ownership prevents shared services from becoming unmaintained organizational commons.