MDB Weekly for Jan 2, 2023

Welcome to my first issue of modern digital business weekly. This is a new format that I'm experimenting with. MDB weekly will focus on articles, interviews, and events of note I've released in the past week. Along with any announcements of new courses and books. Additionally, it will contain timely industry news and other information that I think might be of interest to you. My focus is to make this available in a variety of easy to consume formats. To start, it'll be available in a written format as an article on my site, along with an email newsletter. It will also be available in an audio format on my modern digital business podcast. You can read or listen in whatever format or location is easiest for you. If this is successful, I will experiment with other formats as well, including video. Each format will be the same content, but it will be optimized for that particular platform. This format, the audio podcast format, will be a weekly very short episode on the Modern Digital Business podcast, and it'll be released on Monday mornings. I hope you enjoy this new for 2023 feature. So let's get started. First an announcement. My next O'Riley book, Overcoming IT complexity, has finally been released and is available for purchase on all major platforms, including Amazon.com. The ebook version is available immediately with the print version scheduled to ship later in January. If you want to take a look at it, go to my website, leeatchison.com or check out the show notes. Or I simply type it complexity into the search bar on amazon.com. Speaking of IT complexity. Infrastructures are hugely complex. Often they are initially created by a series of one-off decisions. Each component added to the system is different than the component next to it. One server is different than the next one networks, which is different from the next. As an application grows. So does the number of one-off decisions that get made that make up the applications, infrastructure? This can lead to, uh, a highly complex infrastructure architecture that is hard to manage. This complexity means fragility in the infrastructure. Seemingly minor problems can end up being significant issues. Uh, lack of shared understanding by those involved in maintaining the infrastructure means that simple changes end up causing mistakes that lead to errors. Bottlenecks and ultimately outages. Even when there is the possibility of reusability of components, such as a series of servers working as a single fleet to operate an application, a service. There are often individual differences that are created between each individual server making each of them unique. Sometimes these changes are minimal. And sometimes they're nearly invisible. But sometimes they are critical to keeping the server operational. These subtle differences mean that if you need to replace a component, Recreating that component and its configuration. Can be difficult. Infrastructure is code or IAC. Simplifies this problem because it encourages reusing reusable patterns. With IAC, for example, you can repeatedly use a single server template for each server in a given fleet. All of your servers used for a particular purpose are set up and configured identically. I see, can reduce errors and problems, but can it reduce infrastructure complexity overall? In my recent container journal article, I give you four ways. IAC can reduce an infrastructure is complexity. If you'd like to read these four ways, head on over to campaigner journal by clicking on the link in the show notes.