I need to replace my work phone. The battery has been on “needs service” for a while now. However, more importantly, I’m almost at a point where it won’t receive security updates and the like. There’s no viable way to securely continue using this phone in the long term. So in the next few weeks I will have to go through a changeover to a new phone.
Sometimes something isn’t viable in its current state but long term it’s fine. Case in point: the two inflatables on the right. The lights inside them died last year. They look fine during the day but at night, they aren’t easily seen. Thankfully, there are several YouTube videos which cover how to replace the lights with even more powerful ones. And the parts are super cheap. Updating these inflatables is viable. if the fix was anywhere close to the cost of buying new, I would not consider repairing them as viable.
From an architecture perspective, sometimes we can reuse what we have, but the cost is prohibitive. For instance, if you need to use Arc to patch on-premises servers because the OS is past the extended support end date, that’s not cheap. Yes, you could continue using the OS, but the cost will eventually eat the organization alive. The money spent patching an out-of-date OS… could that be put to better use? Likely it can. So while there is a way to keep going, from an architectural perspective, it’s not viable.
I know in this post and the previous one I mentioned cost. As technical people, we can get wrapped up in the technical details of a proposed solution that we ignore the cost. It just doesn’t enter into our visibility. Yet cost is one the biggest drivers for any decision. For instance, if the proposed way to mitigate a security vulnerability costs more than what the asset is worth, unless there is a moral or ethical reason to do so, choose that mitigation path is a bad business decision. That also makes it a poor architectural decision. Sometimes a solution is no longer viable because there isn’t a path forward and sometimes a solution isn’t viable because there are better options out there from the organization’s perspective. If something isn’t viable any longer, it’s time to move on.