Part IV
Ongoing operations
Our work with an architecture is not finished when a system is up and running. A working application requires ongoing maintenance and effort to keep it running successfully.
Systems will be in a maintenance phase during the longest part of their life cycles. This phase is where we add features, detect and fix defects, and analyze the system's behavior to prevent problems.
To be able to do that successfully, we need to have tools to cover two basic elements:
- Observability: This is the capability of knowing what's going on in a live system. Low-observability systems are difficult or even impossible to understand, which makes it difficult to know if there are problems or work out the cause of those problems. In high-observability systems, it's easy to infer the internal state and the events flowing inside the system, which allows for easy detection of the critical structures where problems are being generated...
