The Case for Boring Technology

In technology, “boring” is usually meant as an insult. It suggests something old, conservative, unimaginative, or simply behind the times. In infrastructure, though, boring can be one of the nicest things you can say about a system. A boring system is often one that has been around long enough for people to understand it. Its failure modes are known, its tools are mature, its documentation exists, and the strange edge cases have usually hurt somebody else first. With luck, that person wrote down what happened and how to fix it. This is not the same thing as saying old is always better. Plenty of old technology deserves to be replaced, and some systems survive mainly because replacing them would be expensive or disruptive. There is still an important difference between technology that is obsolete and technology that is simply mature. Novelty Has a Cost New technology can solve real problems, but it can also introduce new ones that are not obvious at first. A new framework may make…