Third Era—Complexity

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Complexity source
Copyright 2020 Eric Dobbs. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

And the reality is more complicated than we thought. So we're succeeding. We've got a growth in revenue. We're bringing in more customers. For that matter, we're hiring more employees to manage the demand. We've got much more data coming from those more customers. We keep writing more code. And we write the code into more components in a complex system. Some of those components are the ones that deploy the other components into the cluster. All of that's growing. And to all of that, we're adding different metrics, and events, and logging, and traces, alerting around all of those things. All of those things are impinging on this continuous change that is feeding the incident feedback loop. We've got all of those things, multiplying together, creating a combinatorial complexity. If you know a log-linear chart, you can see this is growing faster than exponential. The important thing, if you don't know a log-linear chart, is that those kinds of problems are actually out of reach of automation.