Edge platforms earn their keep by handling cross-cutting concerns: authentication, rate limits, routing, and coarse aggregation. Trouble starts when product-specific branching creeps into those layers because “it was faster.”
During boundary workshops we list every policy currently enforced at the gateway and ask whether a domain team could own it instead. Policies that encode business eligibility, pricing tiers, or fulfilment rules usually belong closer to the data.
A boring gateway is a gift. It changes on a slower cadence, fails in familiar ways, and lets domain teams ship without negotiating edge releases.
If your gateway pull requests read like product tickets, the boundary has already drifted.