MAOPS 4: How does technical debt hamper new feature development,
hosting efficiencies, or cost reductions?
Technical debt of the platform is a distraction and limits the ability to devote time to more significant innovations or feature additions that could otherwise drive company growth. Organizational technical debt could be unintentional due to mergers and acquisitions activity. These organizations need to work towards consolidating these processes, structures, cloud-native tools, and buyer needs to understand the efforts needed to reduce or remove this technical debt.
MAOPS04-BP01 Standardize documented operational processes (like CI/CD
and deployment)
Organizations incur operational tech debt during mergers and acquisitions. Organizations should remove manual processes and focus on automation.
MAOPS04-BP02 Retire or consolidate redundant apps and
data-stores
Perform technical analysis during mergers and acquisitions. Otherwise, data and systems can be duplicated, or even potentially orphaned. Both organizations should agree on a consistent data model, consistent accesses, and compliance needs.
MAOPS04-BP03 Have a process in place for customer migration (if
necessary)
Customer retention and migration is of utmost importance during mergers and acquisitions. It is critical to support existing customers with optimal costs and negligible impact. The AWS ISV Workload Migration Program (WMP) supports software partners that have a SaaS offering on AWS to drive and deliver workload migrations. Use funding, technical enablement, and go-to-market support to rapidly migrate customers to your SaaS offering.
MAOPS04-BP04 Understand third-party integrations and
dependencies
It might happen that companies merge or multiple platforms get developed over time and duplicate some of the same needed subsystems. Being service oriented and consolidating services reduces the amount of code to be maintained.
MAOPS04-BP05 Perform all customizations through configuration, and
change them as self-serve or company-controlled feature flags
Customizations that are done with configuration do not require a code recompile or reload. It is a way to get away from the legacy practice of making hard-coded customizations per individual customers or segments. Use feature flags that are temporary or permanent. These flags help during testing or canary release.
