Thread by @swardley

X : What's the difference between legacy and toxic IT?
Me : All IT is toxic over time. If you really must insist on using the legacy term, then today, you should probably describe your existing DevOps / IaaS effort as "new legacy" and earlier efforts (vDCs, DCs, SANs) as "toxic"

X : Well, what's "new"?
Me : New would be conversational programming, designing around capital flow i.e. starting to happen.
X : What's current in tech?
Me : Well, current in tech is never new. It needs a good 4-5 years to become "current". Today, that would be serverless.

X : We're just about to embark on our DevOps / IaaS effort. Are you really saying we should call that the "new legacy"?
Me : That will take you about 7 years if you're any scale. I would say "we're building new legacy" and once you've finished admire your "toxic" landscape ...

... think about it. If it takes 7 years (which is what Netflix did to get rid of its DCs) then by 2026 you'll have a fully functioning IaaS / DevOps environment in a landscape that shifted more serverless 11 years earlier and embarked on IaaS / DevOps some 18 years earlier.

... a better idea would be to skate to where the puck is going, not where the puck was last week. However, to do so, you're going to have to engage and learn. The practices around serverless are just emerging. Hence the tendency to play safe, stick with what is long established.

X : What sort of practices?
Me : Oh, around capital flow, security, conversational programming, debugging etc. There'll be some re-invention of the past. A useful set of principles are :-
1. Focus on Value
2. Design for Experience
3. Start Where You Are
4. Work Holistically
...

5. Progress Iteratively
6. Observe Directly
7. Be Transparent
8. Collaborate
9. Keep It Simple
stick to those and you'll be fine.
X : That's DevOps!
Me : No, that's ITIL - medium.com/@kaimarkaru/wh…

Me : What everyone forgets is that every time we industrialise a set of technology, we get co-evolved practice and a new faction which learns from the past by re-inventing it. One day we will get over this but we're not a mature enough industry to realise it yet.

X : DevOps is more about the culture.
Me : Ah, you saying ITIL wasn't or that the culture is different? Be mindful, every approach which faces change often falls back on culture to give it relevance.
X : Are you saying there is no point to DevOps?
Me : No ...

... new practice co-evolved with cloud and these are useful to learn and to adapt to the future. But, they come with inertia. Many of the early adopters of serverless will be laggards in the cloud i.e. ITIL organisation that decide to skip the whole "cloud infrastructure" space.

Me : In the same way, many of the laggards to serverless will be organisation that were early adopters to cloud / DevOps. It's all a matter of how well they deal with any inertia they create.
X : I think you're wrong.
Me : That's fairly common.

... what you need to realise however is that all forms of capital can become toxic as the components evolve - whether activities, practice, data or knowledge. There would have been a time that "flat earth" was not only considered relevant but forward thinking. C'est la vie.