After, more than <cough>two decades<cough> in a professional role of some sort of ops, engineer, architect, dev ops person in IT or Information Security in very large multinational Fortune 1-50 sized companies I have grown to dislike complexity in a way that some people without my experience may think is unnatural if not completely unhealthy. I have two complexity quotes that I came up with that I like to use and I use them often or very often when I am talking to third party outside consultants or vendors…
1. Complexity kills and scale is a complexity multiplier.
2. Complexity breeds insecurity.
And a third that I didn’t come up with but love and have as one of my primary email signatures at work…
3. A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
The last is known as John Gall’s Law or more simply as Gall’s Law[1].
These all feed the corollary which is often stated as K.I.S.S.. Keep It Simple Stupid.
When I am called in to look at problems, the more complexity that is there, generally the worse the problem is. The more unstable it is. The more likely it is to break. The less likely the people supporting it understand it well enough to properly support or in fact, support at all – mostly they just let it run and do a lot of burning of incense around server racks to appease the IT gods. But seriously, the more complex the system, the less likely ANYONE ANYWHERE understands it.
So when I am called in to sort something out or come up with some sort of initial design, usually my solutions are based on the simple concept, “How do I make this simpler?” or “How do I do this in the most simple way possible?” I visualize supporting it for 5 or 10 or 15 years and what will make this painful if not done properly? When I am called at 2AM to work on it after 2 days of no sleep and I finally got to sleep at 1AM, can I quickly and easily fix it and go back to sleep? And while the generic concept is simple to say (or write), it isn’t always simple to make things simpler, it can, in fact, be very very VERY hard. Like they say, if it were simple, everyone would be doing it. But as hard as it may be, the payoff is the investment in an environment or system that is easier to understand, easier to support, and quite frankly, less likely to break in the first place. The goal of all designers and architects and operational staff and really anyone building any kind of system should be to keep it simple…
Again, repeat it with me, Keep It Simple Stupid.
joe
[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gall
