undefined | Better HN

0 pointsjiggawatts4y ago0 comments

Just to add to what killtimeatwork said above:

I'm watching what happens when enterprise architecture is done badly, right now. I'm currently assisting a huge agency that is a mish-mash of smaller agencies. Multiple clouds, several data centres, hundreds (if not thousands!) of "apps" and servers. Every combination of bare metal, VMs, and cloud IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Much of it overlapping or redundant functionality.

It's an unmitigated clusterfuck: A nightmare tangle of interdependencies, band-aids, duplicated systems, inconsistent DR, non-existent DR, partial HA, and on and on.

If you've ever seen a "spaghetti base" in Factorio, it's like that, but as if a hundred players had been building one for a decade. Not just spaghetti, but multiple interwoven styles of spaghetti.

It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't seen it. Recently, someone upgraded a Layer 7 load balancer in a legacy data centre and broke an application in an unrelated Public Cloud because someone hard coded a HOSTS entry for the internal certificate CRL distribution point. Why was a cloud service using legacy internal PKI? Reasons. Why did it need a HOSTS entry? More stupid reasons.

The technical details don't matter, of course. The moral of the story is that because they don't have a good EA at the helm, they're still adding to the spaghetti.

I'm watching this unfold in slow motion. Layers of new stuff just draped over the existing garbage. No uplift. No clean-up. Nothing ever turned off. Just buried under new strata, slowly fossilising.

It's fantastic yet horrifying to watch, like a slow motion shipwreck.

0 comments

6 comments · 5 top-level

ownagefool4y ago· 1 in thread

When you say reasons, for me those reasons vary from "we have a PKI and I'm lazy" to "EA told me we have a strategic PKI that I have to use".

And it's typically not the former, because getting the network connectivity is usually way more effort.

jiggawattsOP4y ago

Precisely. Enterprise Architects can fail by being bad at their job, or they can fail in absentia.

This place is a heady mix of both.

pjmlp4y ago

The irony is that with enough experience, you get a gut feeling for these kind of scenarios and the only thing one can do is to fasten the seatbelt and brace for impact, because of the politics involved no one really wants to listen.

closeparen4y ago

The way my Silicon Valley company manages this is basically by having an infrastructure org. There is a catalog of about 3 managed storage services. One stateless compute platform. One HTTP ingress platform. One message broker. One workflow orchestrator. One RPC fabric. Two supported languages with central CI infrastructures.

There are hundreds of teams serving specific business goals, and thousands of services between them, but everything gets made out of substantially the same parts. No one person has the 10,000 foot view, but the platform is sufficiently comprehensive and it's sufficiently hard to deviate, that no one really needs to.

Now if you were hoping to have each team build from raw materials while still having coherence between projects, I can see why you might think you need this role. But I submit that it's probably simpler and more effective in the long run to just give people the building blocks you want them to use.

MattPalmer10864y ago

Ah reasons... we've all had to approve horrible kludges to get something delivered.

The truth is you never get completely clean beautiful architecture or code, there are always trade-offs to make along the way.

Most change takes place in individual work streams, which are most concerned with delivering their scope on time and budget. There is typically no budget to consider changes that have wider scope or which might derail delivery. So kludges.

But without the longer term vision and commitment to paying down technical debt it becomes spaghetti as you say, whether you're a developer or an architect.

gctwnl4y ago

Sounds like a super example of 'loosely coupled spaghetti'

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse