Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Taming software sprawl and demystifying your distributed architecture (PRT032)

Summary

• Andrew Boyaji, a DevOps evangelist from Atlassian, discusses the challenges of software sprawl in distributed architectures.
• Software sprawl is characterized by a rapid increase in software components and frequent changes by distributed autonomous teams, leading to increased complexity.
• The State of DevOps report indicates a 29% reduction in high-performing software delivery teams, assessed by lead time for changes, mean time to recover, deployment frequency, and change failure rate.
• Three symptoms of software sprawl are identified:
  1. Multiple post-incident reviews citing upstream changes as the root cause of outages.
  2. Teams being busy but unproductive, with high output but low objective achievement.
  3. Governance teams becoming bottlenecks, slowing down development.
• Atlassian's Compass application is presented as a solution to these symptoms, offering pre-release collaboration, an activity feed for incident collaboration, a decentralized service catalog, and automated scorecards for compliance.
• The talk emphasizes the importance of scalable developer collaboration, self-service information culture, and unintrusive compliance reporting to address software sprawl.

Insights

• The shift towards loosely coupled architectures and microservices has led to benefits such as scalability and faster development but also introduced the challenge of managing increased complexity.
• Traditional management methods are failing in the face of software sprawl, necessitating new tools and approaches.
• The symptoms of software sprawl can be subtle and require a holistic view of the development environment to identify.
• Developer collaboration is crucial, both before releases to prevent incidents and during incidents to facilitate quick recovery.
• A centralized service catalog with decentralized management, like the one offered by Compass, can help reduce the invisible effort of documentation and improve team autonomy and velocity.
• Automated scorecards can balance the need for compliance with organizational standards and the need for delivery velocity, allowing governance teams to focus on teams that need help rather than routine reporting.
• Engaging with developers to understand their pain points is essential for identifying and addressing issues related to software sprawl.