This week, Richard and I talk about dealing with legacy systems. Of course, defining exactly what “legacy” means is part of the trick. We settle on a loose definition that I’ve been using: it’s the software in production that you’re sort of afraid to change.
Why would you be afraid? Well, it usually starts with having poor test coverage—so you’re not sure if changes will break the application. The criticality of the system adds to that fear: if you make a change, and it breaks, business will be lost. We discuss some basics of re-platforming legacy applications to Pivotal Cloud Foundry, but also how to avoid getting trapped by legacy in the future.
In addition to that discussion we go over recent news in the cloud-native world from security, to AWS outages and how to think about uptime in the public cloud, a round-up of studies that shows small teams are better than large teams, and some interesting anecdotes from the UK GDS.
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Show Notes
News
- LinkedIn password breach (from 2012). Biting people now who don’t rotate passwords, or use different ones for each site. Justin’s three R’s security stuff.
- Snapchat has more daily users (150M) than Twitter (140M). Question: how do YOU use Twitter?
- Extended AWS outage in Australia
- Gartner govt prediction on public cloud usage for security and cost.
- How to talk about availability and SLAs with cloud. Make sure to focus on app-level resilience, not just infrastructure.
- “Diseconomies of scale” – small teams perform better paper round-up
- UK Digital service anecdotes about shifting to user-centric enterprise software – some good anecdotes on cloud stuff got government.
Legacy and migration? “The dumpster fire of IT”
- Defining legacy
- Coté’s cloud-native booklet has a section on dealing with legacy.
- Reasons people think to lift-and-shift. 20-30% of apps can move to PCF, some say.
- Escape Velocity applies to enterprise portfolio management.
- Is legacy the wrong word? “Production apps” instead?
- Why is lift-and-shift appealing?
- How to filter for lift-and-shift.
- A toothless person will start flossing.
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