Key Concepts

Reduce the cognitive load of teams and improve their capacity.

The problems across the industry indicate we need to rethink and retool from the bottom. A key fundamental of Open Source Infrastructure (as Code) is a "pay now, live later" approach vs. the traditional whims of instant gratification. Our approach leads to a culture of continuous improvement and responsiveness and avoids a path of 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 provide the firm foundation needed. Open Source Infrastructure (as Code) aims to lessen the chaotic approach of traditional large organizations' cloud engineering practices by providing examples and ideas around a compelling, supportable foundation that makes 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 that tries to solve everyone's problems. The former leads to a more stable, focused, and intuitive tooling design to solve 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.