Catchy bold statement out of the way first. After years in the business, I can claim I can spot the IT system problem, in your company, easily. Whenever meeting some IT company people , I ask very early for the IT Landscape diagram. Hence the garden analogy.
The answer usually goes from “what is IT landscape” to “of course, its a bit of a legacy but yes we have it”. My advice and experience:
IT landscape not kept in a strict order, and not watched over constantly, is a sure sign organization is having a lot of issues with IT, including a lot of non trivial costs. And those issues might be very likely existential in nature.
You need to prune and graft and water you garden every day. Customers are watching. After AWS incident, more that ever.
And (if there are any) investors they are watching very closely. Because they employ experienced architects and engineers to signal the troubles ahead. In English: Pull out Quickly.
Here is the ubiquitous diagram, Take the step back, think and place you organization on that curve.
Very recent 2025OCT20 AWS outage of US-EAST-1 data center / region, is a proof of that fundamental curve. How?
“Historical decisions”, read GREED, have lead to US-EAST-1 being the SINGLE CONTROL PLANE on the whole planet for the whole of AWS infrastructure. As we would like to call it SPOF aka “Single Point Of Failure”
Alas. That “business decision” has led to a very high entropy for the global AWS IT Landscape). And yes indeed, AWS had a lot of top engineers basically working actively against issues being a stream of consequences of that decision. And then 2023/2024 Amazon for yet another business (read: greedy) reason has started to “let them go”, those top engineers. The same people “keeping it all together”.
The rest is history. The epic failure and the epic outcome of that “historical decision”. Business decision that fatally increased the entropy of the AWS IT Landscape.
Lesson to be learned: Keep your IT Landscape out of the Business sight. For everybody’s benefit.
- Very deep explanation on what is US-EAST-1 . It appears it was clear back then (in 2023) what are the issues.