Rajiv Shah recently led a discussion at the Cloud and Infrastructure Melbourne event on the thorny topic of how complex should your architecture be?
This is a common challenge – enterprise architecture principles encourage simplicity and the use of standard patterns, but in today’s environment teams want the freedom to experiment and trial different technologies. There is also the concern over supply chain diversity – using a single provider stack simplifies your architecture, but makes you reliant on that vendor.
The discussion covered a range of topics, but I thought that the main takeaway is that simplicity is the goal, but you need to allow the right amount of complexity and flexibility to enable innovation and opportunities – the “Goldilocks” zone. But most importantly, engage early with your local friendly governance experts in cybersecurity and enterprise architecture so they can find a way to help you do what you need, rather coming along later and forcing them to say no to what you’ve already done!