The New(ish) Complexity

The API economy and microservices architectures, led by Agile and DevOps, have introduced a massive amount of hidden complexity. I call it hidden complexity because we have a tendency in IT to focus on the problems in front of us, resolve them, then focus on the new problem in front of us. This leaves technical debt in little piles behind us, like the bits that fall off the ends of a snowplow blade (or the asphalt that squishes out the end of the steamroller for our southern friends).

I was thinking about this when I was looking into how a majority of you handle scalability. The layers of complexity for scalability are surprising. In the past, we invested upfront to be prepared to scale to the levels we need. Today we allow expenses to grow as users grow. That is a great model if users are tied to revenue. If there is any fungibility at all in the correlation of users to revenue (and there almost always is), this is a potential disaster waiting to happen. “Our traffic spiked 200%, but revenue only grew 20%,” is pretty much the last thing your business leaders want to hear. Because in the “Pay as you grow” world, a 200% spike in users means a significant spike in overhead. How much overhead varies pretty wildly, of course, so I’ll just say “Guaranteed and significant” and leave it at that.

This is a known bit of complexity, but those of you I’ve spoken with have done little to hedge against it. That’s … interesting. How many other hidden land mines are out there, being ignored by us?

What can you do? That greatly depends upon your business. with internal systems, you have a lot of say in usage. External systems are where this is potentially an issue. You can pay your provider to block DDoS, so at least you’re not paying for that bandwidth if that happens—and most of the people I spoke with really do have some form of DDoS protection that stops traffic before it becomes a fee-generating hit. But for actual growth, the best you can do is get with business leaders and determine what influences the correlation between users and revenue. What makes those people upping your traffic actually spend money while they’re upping your traffic? What can you do to convince more of them to spend money? What services are you not offering that might be useful to those customers and not significantly increase overhead. Basically, this is the modern equivalent of the conversion problem. They’re on your site, how do you convert them to paying users of your site.

We really can’t get more detailed than that—you know your business, and a media site is a different model than a retail site, for example—so you’ll have to develop beyond that. But have a plan that does what you can to make sure that when expenses go up, revenue goes with it.

And keep rocking it. We’re outside the historical IT realm here—because you’re all rocking it so well that we have new things to worry about. Give those customers rockstar apps to work with and figure out how to make them paying customers. Develop those bonds with business leaders; you do indeed need each other.