From TFiR: Managing the Enterprise Configuration Complexity Clock for Modern Application Networks

At scale, an Enterprise has to deal with integration configurations that may consist of K8s, service mesh, 3rd party tooling, and infrastructure. The management and governance of these configurations, especially under a Zero Trust environment, are complex and sophisticated. Misconfigurations easily lead to security vulnerabilities and governance nightmares. In the IT Operations world, it is critical to be able to maintain configurations easily, which is the so-called configuration complexity issue.

To solve this issue, the IT industry has evolved configuration management solutions from hard-coded data, to value-managed configurations, to rules engines, and eventually Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). With DSLs, engineers can do many things. However, as the configuration complexity increases, DSLs become harder to understand, maintain and afford, especially for proprietary DSLs. In the end, the efforts spent on maintaining DSLs equal that of maintaining hard-coded configurations. We find ourselves back at zero, trapped in the Configuration Complexity Clock (CCC) issue.

Enterprises are increasingly migrating from traditional software environments to more dynamic ones where the application becomes the network. These applications consist of distributed workloads, connected via APIs, and running on hosts that are multi-cloud and hybrid. The configuration complexity becomes unmanageable and unaffordable. The market calls for a robust, resilient, and transparent application network management framework.

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