Episode 9: Dealing with Legacy, Cloud Native & Otherwise (Ep. 22)

This week, Richard and I talk about dealing with legacy systems. Of course, defining exactly what "legacy" means is part of the trick. We settle on a loose definition that I've been using: it's the software in production that you're sort of afraid to change. Why would you be afraid? Well, it usually starts with having poor test coverage: so you're not sure if changes will break the application. The criticality of the system adds to that fear: if you make a change, and it breaks, business will be lost. We discuss some basics of re-platforming legacy applications to Pivotal Cloud Foundry, but also how to avoid getting trapped by legacy in the future. In addition to that discussion we go over recent news in the cloud native world from security, to AWS outages and how to think about uptime in the public cloud, a round-up of studies that shows small teams are better than large teams, and some interesting anecdotes from the UK GDS.