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2 Evolution Phases At The Same Time

This is the most frequent challenge people face when learning Evolution: there are components that fit into two phases of Evolution.


Look at the table below:



Arguments for Commodity

Arguments for Custom

Electricity

Electricity standards - power socket

Non-trivial production and infrastructure management

LLMs

You interact with all LLMs in the same way

Constantly changing infrastructure, we do not really understand how does it work not what are the limitations

Cloud Services

Predictable, SLAs, Contracts, Resilience, Easy to Use, Well-known

Non-trivial management


The thing is that Evolution depends on your perspective. If you are a consumer of capabilities, you see and care only about the commodity aspects of those components. Therefore, you would place them in the commodity phase.


But if you are a producer, customers expect Commodity, but you deal with Custom all the time. This is what business is about - you simplify the world for your customers by handling the difficult stuff.


By convention, practitioners tend to place such components in the Commodity space - because the standard contract is very important for everyone, and experts will recognise underlying complexity anyway.


Long time ago, I have proposed a special notation to mark that a component has a complex chain of dependencies but it was purposefully removed from a map. Unfortunately, it did not pick up.



The symbol of a commodity component with hidden custom dependencies.
The symbol of a commodity component with hidden custom dependencies.

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