A Pipeline Made of Airbags
This is a weird article. If the two systems the author described worked so well, how did the business ever decide to &quot;bulldoze&quot; it and replace it with something inferior? Even if you take the view that some non-technical person came in and demanded a particular technical change (??), any halfway-competent business is going to keep the old thing running while they build the new one so they can continue making money, and they&#x27;ll notice that the new thing doesn&#x27;t work as well as the old. Right?<p>I get the sense something is missing, and I get the sense the missing thing was that the replacements were <i>actually better for the business</i>. A couple of highly-talented people on a small team where the original developers owned production operations could run it as designed, and it was &quot;really neat,&quot; but the business was limited in how they could use the system. Perhaps you couldn&#x27;t easily add developers and make them work on new features. Perhaps you couldn&#x27;t integrate OSS components that worked fine, and you were left behind your competitors. Perhaps the &quot;one or two developers&quot; who operated the system got married and started a family and weren&#x27;t able to be on-call 24&#x2F;7&#x2F;365 any longer. Perhaps this system was one of dozens run by the business, and all the other ones were using crash-only containers, and this system continued to be the odd one out.<p>I&#x27;d like to hear from the other side of this - I&#x27;d like to hear the stories of the people who pushed the redesign away from the systems. Until then, this seems entirely too much like &quot;We built this awesome prototype with a bunch of neat properties in theory.&quot; My suspicion is that the other side of these migrations were <i>also</i> driven by highly-talented technical people who have technical stories to tell, but their story is that they cleared out a bunch of technical debt and replaced it with a higher-reliability system.