Tech Insights

The benefits of decomposing your business’s large monoliths are well established. Your company’s systems may have started small, and their simplicity may have allowed for rapid initial development. However, as they’ve grown, complexity has increased, and work has slowed. It’s time to break things up into loosely coupled systems so that a slowdown in one area doesn’t affect the whole system, and multiple teams can make rapid iterations without getting bogged down in negotiating dependencies with other parts of the system.

Now the question is how. You’ve got ideas, and some of the components to break out seem obvious, but do those ideas add up to a coherent vision that puts you where you want to be a few years down the road? Or are you likely to hit stumbling blocks, like systems not getting the data they need via a reasonable path, complications arising from unexpected dependencies, or user experiences made complex by asynchronous data? Where should you start if you want to avoid troubles down the line?

Gene Kim, Author, Researcher, and Founder of IT Revolution, has been studying technology organizations since 1999. His research and ideas around development practices, operational stability and reliability, and security and compliance are solid.

In the article, Five Ways Leaders Can Improve Developer Productivity, I shared my view of the five ideals from Gene Kim’s Unicorn Project and the steps software development leaders can take to achieve them within their teams. Now let’s examine some engineering and architectural changes you can make to continue improving developer productivity.

Developer productivity is one of the most important yet overlooked metrics in DevOps. Gene Kim’s Unicorn Project provides five ideals to help software development teams reduce friction and create an environment of high productivity, innovation, happiness, and engagement. In this article, we use Kim’s ideals as a framework to offer tips for leaders who are looking to improve their development teams.

Building a system of microservices to support your business’s operations is a challenge faced by architects and executives at companies large and small. Orchestrating flows of data and actions across many services and servers without breeding complexity that slows your development and saps your agility is demanding. Data streaming services are an excellent option for connecting your microservices, maintaining efficiency, and controlling costs. Here’s how to get started connecting your microservices with the data streaming service Apache Kafka.

Moving your software development teams from working on operational to strategic goals is essential to your company's innovative future. However, the best developer’s time is too often occupied working on existing business solutions, which greatly hampers their ability to work on future business. Even if you had an unlimited budget to hire new resources, without an infusion of the tribal knowledge diffused among your existing teams, those new hires might have too much to learn about your environment to be immediately productive.