DeveloperWeek 2020

We often hear about architectural “scale” as if it’s one-dimension and linear. In fact, it is neither, and that’s breaking our tools and processes. Where modern, microservice-based architectures are concerned, “large-scale systems” aren’t simply larger versions of “small-scale” systems – they are something completely different. Enter the “deep system.”
In this talk, we first develop a shared intuition and formal definition for “deep systems” and their common properties: they are layered, distributed, concurrent, multi-tenant, change continuously, and are a beast to manage with conventional tools! We then re-introduce the fundamentals of control theory from the 1960s, including the original conceptualizations of Observability and its conceptual cousin, Controllability. Finally, we use examples from Google and other organizations to illustrate how deep systems have damaged our ability to observe software, and what we need to do in order to regain confidence and control.