Everything is a little bit broken; or, The illusion of control

We never change the amount of work or technical debt; we just shift it, and with it, we change how it emerges and appears. Our systems don’t have to be perfect to be operational—planes and networks function at extremely high levels even though they are not operating at 100%.

As an industry, we’ve moved the locus of control from hardware to operating system to virtual machine to container to orchestration, and now we’re approaching serverless. None of that has reduced the amount of work that must happen, it just makes it possible to reuse and conceptually compress the work of others. Since we’re making the work in our tools less visible, we also have less control over how they work. We end up assuming that the promises that have been true will continue to be true, but that’s not in our control.

Heidi Waterhouse explores how you handle this level of uncertainty by adding in error budgets, layered access, and other accommodations for failure and for designing your systems for function over form or purity.