Over the last couple of posts, we’ve referred to the following diagram and its ability to create a glass ceiling on OSS feature releases:
Yesterday’s post indicated that the current proliferation of microservices has the potential to amplify the strangulation.
So how does that compare with the previous approach that was built around COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) OSS packages?
With COTS, the same time-series chart exists, just that it sees the management of legacy, etc fall largely with the COTS vendor, freeing up the service provider… until the service provider starts building customisations and the overhead becomes shared.
With microservices, the rationalisation responsibility is shifted to the in-house (or insourced) microservice developers.
And a third option: If the COTS is actually delivered via a cloud “OSS as a service” (OSSaaS) model, then there’s a greater incentive for the vendor to constantly re-factor and reduce clutter.
A fourth option, which I haven’t actually seen as a business model yet, is once an accumulation of microservices begins to grow, vendors might begin to offer microservices as a COTS offering.
Having been around the industry for a while now, I do tend to see a bit of a pendulum effect. From off-the-shelf to in-house. From monolithic to disaggregated. From centralised to decentralised. From sophisticated to simplified.
Microservices and cloud are the big things today. The pendulum is forever swinging (except for the two briefest of moments at each end of the arc). I wonder how long before we start to notice a swing away from today’s in vogue models because of the challenges evident in the diagram above?
BTW. You’ll have noticed that I haven’t used the term “modular” above. I’m a big fan of modularity, whether that’s inside a monolithic architecture or as already implied by a disaggregated architecture.
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