Organized Architecture

I’ve mentioned IT pendulums plenty of times before, but today I’m going to use them to explore a different angle on IT: The age of containers and microservices. It’s time to ask yourself if the current architectural design of the overall product offering of IT is the best one you can afford to offer.

Agile and the whole “developer is king” movement brought us a whole lot of independent app teams running off and doing their own thing. While the core of that movement was short-lived, we got a lot of good and bad out of it. The good included breaking the traditional “We change at glacial rates” process that some IT shops had—because a team absolutely wants the tools that will make their job easier, not the ones pre-approved by committee or whatever process a given org used. And the bad included the very things those of us who’ve seen this type of thing play out before warned about. Suddenly, we had critical apps and infrastructure relying on tools that one dev used in his hobby development. Sometimes that was good, and for sure it happened before Agile came along, but now we had an avalanche of it. Stuff that hadn’t been through security; often code/libraries/apps that no one outside the team (or the individual) knew was running in the organization. Some of that stuff is still happening.

And then we hit true uptake of microservices. That drove us to break things up in non-traditional ways. A lot of good came of that process, but a lot of complexity did, too. Complexity shared across applications with a huge spike in API calls and operations with a spike in deployed processes and routing. Perhaps the worst thing to come out of the combination of the two is “Who cares why it failed? Just spin up another!” That movement is mostly dead (thank goodness), but it only died because of the number of high-profile “Oops” issues that it caused. It allowed attackers to go unnoticed; it caused paying customers to spread security details across the web; it caused users to suffer crashes that would have been fixed in any sane development environment … and some of those are still out there. Cases where there’s a script to restart an app or service every X hours because it crashes randomly. Not acceptable. Make all the excuses you like, but if you don’t know what’s causing the crash, you’re wrong to leave the app or service running.

And we introduced a huge amount of complexity. Now we have double the infrastructure—one physical, one virtual (container or cloud). We have applications spread across a lot more systems (be they instances or physical systems) and often across platforms; even across data centers. We live in a very cool time, with some sweet stuff going on. But complexity is a very real problem we need to solve. One app/app portfolio may have limited complexity, but we still allow teams too much leeway in defining the environment the application lives in. We need to offer a happy medium—a world where there are options, but those options are defined, manageable, and secure.

So we’re likely to see a resurgence in the importance of enterprise architecture teams again, with their focus being on organizing the mess we’ve made. Indeed, I know this is underway in a couple of Fortune 500 companies I stay in touch with. And I know of one organization that isn’t doing this and has all their UI functionality running through a single container … for multiple applications. That is no better architecture than each using a completely different UI toolset. So, I expect they’ll want coordinated solutions also. Just so something like that can’t happen again.

You all are doing it, day in and day out. As I often say, just don’t let this bit drag you down. Confront it head-on, approach standardization with “Yes, where it is good; no, where it is not” as your credo. Security is the big one, but maintainability is another. Even with tools like Ansible at their disposal, managing 50 different environments is a bit much for ops if it could be done with five. And keep rocking it. Through a pandemic, meeting increased demand, giving users more and more. Thanks once again, from all of those users who don’t know to thank you.