Through out Werner Vogels AWS re:Invent keynote speech he injects some laws that come from different industries. Their reach has become impactful to technology and are worth a quick recap.
Werner’s philosophical review of Laws and Application to Cloud
#1 Lucas Critique
“It is naive to try to predict the effects of a change entirely on the basis of relationships observed in historical data”
The future is always changing and the data is growing, we will continue to learn new ways to understand the data.
#2 Galls Law
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched to make work. You have to start over with a working simple system”
This is the best of his philosophical review and it is not just cloud, this applies to every startup. It is ok that your architecture will continue to change and improve, it’s ok if you start simple and did not boil the ocean.
#3 Law of Demeter
“Each unit should have only limited knowledge about other units. Only talk to friends, don’t talk to strangers”
Decoupling architectures and microservices continue to support this idea.
#4 Occam’s Razor
“The one with the fewest assumptions should be selected”
Keep it simple when building your cloud architecture.
#5 Reed’s Law
“The utility of large networks scales exponentially with the size of the network”
Which leads to the impact of IoT and launch of AWS IoT.
#6 The Gestalt Principle
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
Great companies build great ecosystems with partners.