How to do it...

Deciding on how to define bounded contexts within a system can be a rewarding endeavor. The process itself encourages teams to have many interesting discussions about the models in a system and the various interactions that must happen between various systems:

1. Before a team can start to define the bounded contexts it works with, it should first start listing the models that are owned by the parts of the system it works on. For example, the media team will obviously own the Attachment model, but it will also need to have information about users, and messages. The Attachment model may be entirely maintained within the context of the media teams services, but the others will have to have a well-defined bounded context that can be communicated to other teams if necessary.
2. Once a team has identified potentially shared models, it's a good idea to have a discussion with other teams that use similar models or the same model.
3. In those discussions, hammer out the boundaries of the model and decide whether it makes sense to share a model implementation (which in a microservice world would necessitate a service-to-service call) or go their separate ways and develop and maintain separate model implementations. If the choice is made to develop separate model implementations, it'll become important to clearly define the bounded context within which the model applies.
4. The team should document clear boundaries in terms of teams, specific parts of the application, or specific code bases that should make use of the model.