Enterprise Architecture for Digital Business

Chapter 7. The Need for Speed

Julia Renouard, F5 VP of Engineering

Dotting the landscape of the world’s highways and freeways are signs declaring the speed limit. While these limits vary based on geography, population density, and from country to country, there exists an underlying shared concept that speed controls correlate with safety.

Just 10 years ago, enterprises were built on organizational assumptions that inherently gated delivery of new software and systems under the principle of ensuring system integrity and uptime. It was, in fact, necessary. Our traditional systems were more monolithic, limited in scale. All functionality was knit together in a more highly coupled system. You could not update one component without impacting the whole. To ensure system integrity and meet commitments to SLAs, technology leaders dedicated teams to focus on operating these IT systems. The world of software operated at a slower pace, and no less on the consumer side. Users were limited in their options; with perpetual licensing models, data-center-focused deployments, and more complex integrations, the cost to change was higher.

A lot has changed in 10 years. With the birth of the public cloud has come a revolution in the way we deliver applications. Cloud-native architectural models and a mesh of loosely coupled, interconnected services provide ready-to-consume building blocks that unleash the ability for modern enterprises to experiment and accelerate at a pace never before experienced. ...