Innovation vs. Stability

In the world of IT, companies are constantly faced with the challenge of driving innovation while simultaneously ensuring the stability and functionality of their systems. These often opposing goals are central aspects for long-term success in the very fast-paced IT world.

The Importance of Innovation

Innovation is the driving force in IT. It enables companies to tap into new markets, increase efficiency, and respond to the changing needs of customers. Innovation can lie in the development of new products, services, or in optimizing existing processes.

In an environment characterized by rapid technological changes, the ability to innovate can determine whether a company remains a leader in its industry or falls behind.

The Role of Stability

While innovation is essential for growth and competitiveness, a stable system landscape forms the foundation on which all processes are built.

Stable systems ensure continuous business operations, protect against data loss, and ensure the security of customer information. In practice, stability means that systems function reliably, downtime is minimized, and the IT infrastructure is resilient to disruptions.

Problems in the Foundation

In recent years, the rapid development and increasing spread of container technologies, container orchestration, and cloud solutions have significantly shaped the IT landscape. However, this dynamic evolution also poses challenges: While the focus is on innovation and scalability, problems, errors, and vulnerabilities in the underlying software and libraries are largely overlooked.

Often, serious security vulnerabilities are discovered in core software components that have been in use for years or even decades. These vulnerabilities are frequently due to simple programming errors that could have been fixed with minimal effort. A key step in avoiding such security risks would be to provide developers and testers with sufficient time and budget to continuously develop and comprehensively test older software.

But why is this often not implemented?

This brings us full circle to the topic of innovation and development: Time and budget are preferentially allocated to this area. This is understandable, but it often overlooks the fact that many innovations are built on the unstable foundation of “old” technologies.

For IT operations teams, this reality often becomes a source of stress and sleepless nights, as it not only brings operational challenges but also costly and time-consuming consequences for companies.

Many are familiar with the fear that the next critical CVE entry in a widely used library (such as glibc) could lead to a true “patch marathon,” hotfixes for numerous software components, and subsequent time-critical rollouts.

Although the effort can often be reduced through automation and standardization, there are situations where this reaches its limits and requires “manual” intervention.

This leads us to another important point: complexity.

The Challenge with Complexity

Complexity in IT landscapes and the abstraction through software development frameworks is a phenomenon that continues to increase with the rapid development of new technologies. This complexity arises from the diversity and, above all, the interconnection of components, technologies, and processes used in modern IT landscapes.

Causes

The reasons for the growing complexity in IT landscapes are varied. On the one hand, advancing digitalization and the need to quickly bring innovative solutions to market lead to increasingly complex software architectures. On the other hand, the integration of various technologies – from cloud services to microservices to container orchestration – increases dependencies and interactions between system components. Continuous updates, patches, and the need to integrate or replace legacy systems further increase overall complexity.

Effects

The complexity has far-reaching implications for the organization and management of IT landscapes. It can increase the susceptibility to errors, as dependencies between components can cause unforeseen problems. Additionally, it makes maintenance and further development of systems difficult, as deep technical knowledge is required to understand and modify a complex system. This can lead to longer development times, higher costs, and challenges in ensuring system stability.

The need for expertise is often underestimated in this context. Frameworks and user-friendly frontends that allow components to be intuitively assembled or rely on standardized functions significantly simplify work – as long as everything runs smoothly. But what happens when unexpected errors occur or the entire system fails?

Often, there is a lack of the required expertise to understand the underlying components, analyze problems, and effectively solve them. This leads to two prevailing approaches in dealing with such problems:

• “Fail Forward”: Adjustments are made to the code and configurations until the system works again.
• A complete reinstallation of the environment, which in the realm of containers, cloud solutions, and automation is often more quickly achievable than lengthy debugging sessions with an uncertain outcome.

However, these approaches do not address the underlying problem, causing the cycle of errors and their fixes to continually repeat.

Solutions?

Unfortunately, there is no simple solution to these problems, as they are often limited by financial, organizational, and temporal conditions, as well as a lack of required expertise.

Open Source

Many companies rely on products and technologies based on open-source projects. Increased financial or personnel support for these open-source projects could make a significant difference. This is already practiced in some areas, but the focus is often on the currently “trendy” projects. A sustainable shift in mindset is needed to give more prominence to libraries and low-level system components that form the basis for many applications. Since these are the foundation for so many other projects.

Chasing New Trends

Another problem is the constant chase for the latest trends. Technology decisions are often made at levels far removed from technical implementation. This leads to existing and working IT landscapes being redesigned in favor of new technologies that are currently considered “the solution.” Although this may be appropriate in many cases, it’s critical to question whether replacing working systems is really necessary. The well-known advice “Never touch a running system” is not a universal solution, but a balanced approach is required. It’s important to understand the existing requirements, assess how they can be implemented, and what resources are available for this purpose.

Building Expertise

Development teams, QA teams, operations teams, etc., must be given time to deeply engage with a topic. This not only saves time in case of problems but can also lead to more sustainable solutions.

If the developed solutions and the acquired knowledge are also made publicly available, for example, as an own open-source project or as adjustments to existing projects, this can also be good marketing for a company.

Conclusion

To address the challenges and problems described here, it is necessary to find a balance that enables companies to be at the forefront of technological development without compromising the security and reliability of their systems. The increasing complexity of IT landscapes, coupled with rapid changes through new technologies like container orchestration and cloud solutions, has raised the risk of security vulnerabilities and system failures. This underscores the need to invest in understanding and developing existing technologies.

Solving this dilemma requires a rethink in how time and resources are allocated. Instead of focusing solely on new trends, companies must also prioritize the maintenance and further development of their existing systems. This includes promoting expertise within their teams and supporting open-source projects, which often form the basis for the development of innovative solutions.

Ultimately, it is the responsibility of companies to foster a culture that values both innovation and stability. This means making decisions not solely based on current trends, but taking a long-term perspective that considers both the potential of new technologies and the importance of a solid, reliable IT infrastructure.