Fundamentals

The essential elements or core components that everything else is built upon or depends on.

The challenges across the industry suggest we need to rethink and retool from the bottom up. A fundamental principle of Open Source Infrastructure (as Code) is finding a better balance between the sacrifices required for sustainable progress and the tendency to seek instant gratification, arguably leading to industry setbacks. In this context, maturity can be defined as sacrificing short-term gains for long-term success. Focusing on maturity and effectively communicating issues and their truths up the hierarchy enables everyone to understand the problems. This approach fosters continuous improvement, enhances agility, and steers us from long-term decline.

Suppose the underlying or lower layer processes are not well-defined. In that case, the upper layers will be unstable and unable to serve their purpose. Open Source Infrastructure (as Code) aims to lessen the chaotic approach of traditional large organizations' cloud engineering practices by providing examples and ideas around compelling, supportable foundations that make it easier for teams to do the right thing—over time, reducing the cognitive load of teams that would otherwise be far beyond their capacity.

🛠️ Tooling

• Choose tooling that leads or guides your teams down a given well-defined path vs. tooling that caters to large organizations' "needs," stemming from the accumulative force of Conway's law. The latter creates extensive, overly complex tooling from companies that profit from complex layering and are incentivized to keep that going. The former leads to a more stable, focused, and intuitive tooling design that solves a reasonable set of issues with minimal overlap.

🤼 People

Contributions

• Engineers at all levels should be able to contribute while having the proper guardrails in place to feel safe and align with organizational requirements.

Development

• Cultivate and develop a strong pool of talented individuals ready to take on work and grow within the organization. We need to have a collection of work available to these individuals that they can complete. For example, any issue created by a service interface should be labeled as a good first issue and documented to make completion of the work possible within the individual's cognitive load.