Managing Complexity
Many more open-source projects are available to the developer of modern
cloud native applications. You can use HashiCorp Vault for credential and
secret management. HashiCorp Terraform and AWS Cloud Formation both
perform deployment automation for true infrastructure as code. The open-
source project Habitat, maintained by Chef, gives you an Anti-Corruption pat-
tern with which to build new applications or modernize existing ones. And we
have not even scratched the surface! But how as an enterprise can you manage
this complexity? A plethora of challenges emerge from these modern tools and
technologies. Developers in the line of business (LoB) create "shadow IT" with
siloed and unmonitored spend. Because each application team adopts its own
set of tools, there is a lack of consistency and commonality. Security and com-
pliance end up being best effort by each individual LoB. This developer free-
dom results in speed and agility, but it is at the cost of sprawling complexity
with little or no governance. Furthermore, an enterprise of any reasonable size
typically has some combination of public and private clouds they need to man-
age, and often strategically engage, with more than one public cloud vendor to
mitigate lock-in.
A number of very innovate products have emerged from small, nimble compa-
nies and organizations. Executives managing any significant amount of cloud
complexity should pay attention to them. Sophisticated products, such as
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