Article Roundup - July 26, 2019

The Evolution of Comcast’s Architecture Guild
Software architecture can get tricky in a large organization. You could have every team do their own thing, but that makes it hard for people to move around and leaders to keep track of everything and ensure things are built well and are kept secure. You could make a few people decide everything, but they are going to lose track of things and burn out very quickly. There is already an organization that creates all kinds of standards and does it very well, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). They are the group responsible for all those RFCs you see scattered around online, like RFC 2616 which sets the standard for HTTP/1.1. The architects at Comcast decided to take a similar approach to the IETF and created working groups to help get people across the organization involved and distribute the decision making. The process seems clear-cut and they seem to be having a fair amount of success with it.

Moving to Observability Driven Development
Setting up monitoring for applications is not something most developers are interested in, and it can get overlooked by operations as well. If everyone doesn’t work together it makes the whole situation more difficult, but if you keep observability in mind when building the application everyone’s life can be easier later on. Having consistent logging can ensure operations can handle the application support instead of escalating to developers. Building in useful health checks can mean systems can be taken offline quickly and automatically. Coordinating development and operations and agreeing on how monitoring will be handled can make everyone’s lives easier and lets operations do what they need to and leave the developers to develop things instead of providing support.