Unquantifiable Value Propositions Flood the Market: Kubernetes This, AI That

Nowadays, advertisements bombard us with promises to revolutionize our lives: claims of unseen scalability, cost optimizations, agility, and enhanced developer productivity. The pitch is always the same: buy our service, and our magical software will solve all your problems.

Here lies the problem. Forty-nine years ago, Fred Brooks, in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month, asserted that there is no silver bullet — no single software development technique, tool, or methodology that can increase development speed by an order of magnitude. His observation was that most time (and money) is spent dealing with the essential complexity of a project: domain models, data flow, and the like. Thus, the magical promises often fail to materialize. At best, these tools might reduce some accidental complexity, but it’s crucial to ensure that the cost of the tool or service is less than the benefit it brings.

Consider this example: a small company decides to “modernize” its infrastructure because it feels outdated, running a few services on mostly manually configured VMs. They see everyone moving to Kubernetes and feel the pressure to follow suit.

They embark on the journey, but the internal team needs to gain the skills and be eager to acquire them. The company needs help, so they hire external contractors who swear to deliver.

And deliver they do. The applications are containerized, Kubernetes clusters are spun up, and the GitOps methodology is strictly followed (God bless Flux and ArgoCD).

And what does the company get? An enormous amount of new accidental complexity on top of the essential one, and a hefty bill for the services delivered.

The developers need learn how to deal with containers, services, scheduling rules, new pipelines, etc. And remember: this is not what brings the revenue, this is new accidental stuff.

Thus arises the question: where is the money, Lebowski?

When embarking on such journeys, make sure you know what you’re doing and aren’t blindly following the latest trend. Remember, there’s no silver bullet.

Real value must be delivered for the greater benefit of everyone, whether you are the company that seeeks the service or a contactor that aims to provide it.