We asked developers from a variety of organizations and industries a simple question: “How long will your application continue to function if you ar

Cloud Native Software’s Technical Debt Is Growing

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2021-07-09 17:00:09

We asked developers from a variety of organizations and industries a simple question: “How long will your application continue to function if you are not allowed to touch its code?” What we found was that the more modern the application, the faster it would cease to work. Legacy applications would be fine for years but cloud native applications would crash and burn within weeks.

Software development has undergone significant changes in the last decade. Software is no longer built completely in-house and instead, there is now what is known as the software supply chain. It includes everything that goes into or touches software as it is being produced: developer tools (IDEs, CI/CD), third-party software (dependencies), or more pervasive parts of the application stack such as language runtimes, monitoring, and testing frameworks.

With this move to the software supply chain, software development has become industrialized. We are building more and more custom software, but producing it more quickly by integrating higher-level building blocks such as OSS or vendor APIs. Modern applications are glue code and as much as 90% of software can be from third-party components. Sophistication and availability of different components in the global software supply chain are what enable this rapid growth of custom software.