Hire engineers that will optimize your apps and systems for the
highest business value and the
lowest cost.
It seems silly and obvious to say that, but many engineers seem to have forgotten that goal.
The 2 mistakes I see over and over are systems that are optimized for Novelty and systems that suffer from Neglect.
## Mistake: Optimizing for Novelty
Bored engineers often optimize for novelty. That means they add technologies to your systems not because they're needed, but because the engineers want to play with them. Rather than consider the implications of making the systems more complex and more costly to manage, they are easily lured by shiny new technology and come up with justifications to use it even if it provides negative business value.
These engineers aren't bad people. They will legitimately think that the new technology is a good idea. They may even make an impassioned business case for it. But listening to these engineers is the equivalent of a naive young girl believing a teenage boy "really loves her" at the end of a first date when he wants to go to Make-Out Point "just to talk". The boy may actually believe this in his heart, but any woman with more experience will see exactly what's really going on.
To see companies that suffer from this, it's as simple as looking at a few job postings for developers. Look for the postings that list requirements for waaaay more technologies than the company could possibly need. It's a sign that novelty has cursed that company.
For more on this, see my post: http://devopsu.com/blog/boring-systems-build-badass-business...
If someone offers to make your systems "exciting and cool!", be very afraid. Your systems are the foundation of your business and they should be simple, secure, scalable, and generally pretty boring.
## Mistake: Neglect
The other problem I see frequently are systems that are simply neglected.
No one knows if the database backups work. No one knows if there are critical security updates that need to be applied. No one knows if the site is down until a customer complains. No one knows if the guy who quit a year ago still has a copy of the production database. On and on...
You will often see neglect in systems that became complex due to novelty. Every new technology that is added to a system requires monitoring, documentation, and security updates. The more technologies that get added to a system means the more technologies that are at risk of becoming orphans and neglected.
## Shameless Plug
Manage servers? One of the biggest wins against neglect is to use a configuration management tool like Ansible, Salt, Chef, or Puppet.
If you want to make sure your systems are fast, scalable, and secure, the first step is having full control and power over them.
Tomorrow, Sept 4th, I'm launching my book "Taste Test: Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible" which is designed to save you the days or weeks of research when picking one of these tools.
In the book, I implement an identical project with each tool so you can see what each one is like to work with. You may be surprised at which ones were super easy and which ones were really difficult to work with.
To get a discount for the book release, just sign up on the mailing list: http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a...