Cloud. A euphemism for the Internet. Internet. A virtual community without any governance. Anarchy! How can we still make sure that this keeps on working?
For many people this may come as a surprise, but for most of us it won’t: The physical world has been divided in countries with each having their own government / governance in place and the Internet is one big global virtual world. The Internet gurus are all convinced that this should never be tampered with. The Internet is self-governing.
Of course there are some principles to which the Internet adheres and within which’ boundaries it further develops. Global agreement on for example domain architecture was necessary. The right choices that have been made in the beginning turned out to be very valuable. Once in a while we do come to a grinding halt however. Think about the limitations of IP numbering. For once and for all let’s not forget: when you, as a developer, think “uhm, that should be big enough”, just multiply it with at least a 1000 from now on. Just as a side note. 🙂
Architecture has been invented to be able to build a foundation that can keep up with future developments on it. Otherwise, stuff implodes. But especially in IT, architecture means “being able to cope with change”. A good architecture can prove its value for years to come. Until the next possible paradigm shi(f)t.
So, is architecture needed? Yes. Can it work in an anarchistic environment like the Internet? For sure. At least, when you take into consideration that you can always be surprised by rebels who don’t care about your architecture and just spray your artwork with graffiti. Or build a terrace on your flat rooftop. By preparing for the worst, at acceptable cost, an architecture can sustain fine. But, like I said before, a next big invention in IT can for sure start shaking the foundations. For example, a bit that can be 1 and 0 at the same time is something we have to carefully think about before we start deploying solutions built on that paradigm massively.
I’m convinced that with the current methods of developing distributed solutions we are well on our way to build fine, architecturally sound applications that can be deployed in the anarchistic clouds. Microservices architecture is an excellent way to thrive in this chaos. Microservices architecture is anarchytecture! So, what are DevOps then, actually?
Cheers, Gijs
p.s. Thank you Skunk Anansie for the inspiration for this blog post and hence its title.
indaField 