10 Reasons You Don’t Need Continuous Updates

jbaruch

1. You’re always and forever happy with your latest release If your last release was pretty stable, you fixed a bunch of bugs, you have quite a few happy users, well, maybe it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie. Why update something good? You have at least 6 months before you need to release the next version, if at all. Maybe, you’ll never have to update it, after all, your code is perfect, and people are always pleased with what they have.
2. Forget microservices. You love the ceremony around big releases. You love the smell of integration hell in the morning. You just can’t get enough of modules not communicating, debugging APIs and negotiating with other teams.
3. Zero downtime? C’mon. Anyone can find some time to shut down to upgrade their systems. Whatever it is they’re doing, your customers should always be able to take your systems down for a bit to install the latest upgrade.
4. DevOps is all hype There’s no way it’ll ever stick. Where are the good old days of silos where I could just throw the software which works on my machine over the wall to Operations, because it’s their problem now?
5. Backwards compatibility is a thing. Versions never conflict, and backwards compatibility never gets broken, so what can possibly go wrong with SemVer?.
6. You trust people more than you do machines. Who needs automation? Once you have an engineer that gets the job done well, why not let him do it over and over again. He’ll just keep getting better at it.
7. IoT will never take off. “Things” will never be as smart as computers. My refrigerator will never talk to the supermarket and order things by itself. Let’s keep appliances dumb.
8. Security vulnerabilities are all a conspiracy theory. Don’t believe all the FUD being spread about the Struts 2 Equifax vulnerability like or Meltdown and Spectre. Those are just rumors spread by people and companies who are trying to push us into endless cycles to unnecessarily update our software all the time.
9. Who needs promotion pyramids. Your developers work real hard to write great quality software. Why not just deploy development builds to production?
10. Rules were made to be broken, so were REST APIs If you have an enhancement to a REST API, why can’t you just change it? Don’t your users want the latest and greatest? Doesn’t the saying go, “Move fast and break things”?