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The 10-year Itch

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The 10-year Itch

It's decision time. Do you re-platform or optimize in place?

Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor)
Feb 22, 2023
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Everyone has opinions about Hey.com's math of moving from the public cloud to the private data center. According to their CTO’s back-of-the-napkin math, the company will save $7M over five years. I’ve seen variations of “you’re using it wrong.” The simple fact is that Hey is at a decision point we all will find ourselves ten years on because technology changes and applications have a lifecycle.

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The practical lifecycle of your app is static even if you built an application today using Kubernetes, containers, and a slick CI/CD process. Technology will improve ten years on. The architecture you used today will look ancient in ten years. What do you do? Do you re-factor for modern architecture, or do you optimize in place?

There’s no way to answer that question today. But I promise if you are in an environment with applications ten years or older, you ask yourself a variation of the question.

We are tackling similar questions at our Hybrid Cloud Virtual Event on March 9th, 2023. Be sure to Register

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3 Comments
Andrew Padilla
Writes Andrew Padilla's Newsletter
Feb 23

a must read. and yes you're right, not all is worth keeping.

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Andrew Padilla
Writes Andrew Padilla's Newsletter
Feb 23

If you subscribe to the ideas and observations that Dave McComb describes in the book 'Software Wasteland', then the cost of evolving your application is much higher than it should be. Applications may have a static lifecycle but often the data is produces doesn't.

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