Micro-strangulation vs COTS customisation

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:
The increasing percentage of tech debt

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 modular microservices begins to grow, vendors might begin to offer microservices as a COTS offering.

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