Michael Krigsman has been humming the "simplicity is good / complexity is … not so good" tune lately – check out this and this – and it sounds pretty good to me. While his focus is primarily on self-induced organizational complexity, I think the same exact points apply to architectural complexity.
In fact, this is how I tend to describe the abstraction presented by an application fabric:
each service and application scales as needed, always work as expected, and manages itself.
Makes sense, doesn’t it?
In practice, the only people who actually like architectural complexity either
- don’t think they have any choice,
- don’t have to code for or operate the resulting apps,
- are so far down into the bowels of the existing, uber-complex architectures that they’ve forgotten that there is a world above-ground that is their natural home, or
- are just trying to show off.
While Todd Fast of Sun makes an interesting point against a sort of "false simplicity", I think that is really a different issue and a bit of a red-herring (which I’ll take up again later).
For my part, I’ll choose architectural simplicity each and every time!
Note: the image is from the cover of a great book, "The Evidential Power of Beauty" by Thomas Dubay, which explores the meaning of simplicity and beauty in the physical world.
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