Technology Radar Vol.20

Developers love abstraction layers, for obvious reasons: by encapsulating complexity into an abstraction they can focus on higher-level concerns. We've seen this evolution across several editions of the Radar in the way teams deal with the intersections of clouds and containers. First, the action focused on Docker and its ecosystem. Then, focus shifted down the stack to Kubernetes. Now, the main activity we see is on infrastructure as code in general and the Terraform ecosystem in particular. Although we've recommended tools beyond Terraform, its adoption in the community of providers has been impressive. Highlights in this Radar include Terratest for testing infrastructure code, and GoCD's new Provider, which lets you configure GoCD using Terraform.

With the advent of "everything as code," almost everything — infrastructure, security, compliance and operations — formerly difficult to change becomes programmatically addressable, meaning that developers could apply good engineering practices; yet all too often we see either highly complex configuration subsystems or over-reliance on visual orchestration tools — logic creeping into configuration files, horrible syntax for conditionals in YAML, and the many orchestration frameworks we saw across a wide variety of technologies. With the advent of polyglot programming, infrastructure as code and x-as-a-service, teams end up with varying components that merge into a single cohesive system. Thus, logic that should reside within a system boundary leaks out into orchestration tools, configuration files, and other plumbing. While this is sometimes necessary, we encourage teams to carefully consider keeping such code in places where developers adhere to testing, version control, continuous integration, and other good engineering practices. Avoid adding business logic in configuration files (and avoid tools that require it), and try to keep necessary orchestration to a minimum rather than a dominant feature of your system.