Release It!, 2nd Edition

How Much Is Right for You?

As we look at the control plane, keep in mind that every part of this is optional. You can do without every piece of it, if you’re willing to make some trade-offs. For example, logging and monitoring helps with postmortem analysis, incident recovery, and defect discovery. Without it, all those will take longer or simply not be done. If you can live with extended outages, or if it’s okay to find out your software is down by getting a call from the CEO, then you don’t need that part of the control plane.

In a more palatable example, you don’t need IP management software if you’re running a static network on physical hardware. Up to a certain scale, this is probably acceptable and may be more cost-effective. Once you ...