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Oh, ho ho. It is so much more than network dependencies. K8s helps somewhat by pointing a possible direction, but this is truly an Alice in Wonderland, "just how deep into the rabbit hole do you want to go?" problem space. Note the following is from the big-org perspective, small organizations don't really have this problem nearly as bad, but might start seeing this more as we all move into the cloud. IMHO, the declarative configuration management folks have their heart in the right place, but at their level we've already lost a lot of information and are just shoving around peas on the plate. Post hoc systems information capture is always a lossy, imprecise, empirically-driven affair. Service registries are only scratching the tip of the iceberg. Everyone is afraid to bite the bullet and start Encoding All The Things, because down that path lies religious wars over what to encode and how to express the encoding. Even with a service registry, I lack information on SLO's, SLA's, RTO's, RPO's, planned outages, A/B (and C/D/E/...) state, ownerships of all kinds, responsibilities of all kinds, architecture, deps of all kinds, onboarding steps and constraints, governance gates, decomm steps and constraints, change approval gates, the timing of each of those, and so on. That's just capturing the information; now imagine the insanity of walking that nightmare graph to seek impossible interlocks (which we humans accept by overriding with outages, for example), or figure out just how long it should take to accomplish a given set of related goals. We currently handle this as an industry through blunt force trauma on the problem space itself, while contorting ourselves as Matrix-like as possible to sustain as little in return upon ourselves in the process, through a hodge podge of techniques, tools, processes, and exasperation. At this point, I'm not exactly certain we'll fully address this space without a Culture Mind-level AI (said tongue in cheek, I really do think there is some promising work being done in this field, it is just a grind). |