Tech is at an inflection point. You and I, could already determine the future and not just of technology, but everything. Of all the industries active right now, tech will have the greatest impact in our lifetime. And look at how far we've come. We have access to nearly limitless, albeit expensive, computing power with just a click of a button. We're solving problems we wouldn't have even considered a decade ago. I want you to take the next few minutes and really dream with me. Dream about how far we might actually be able to go and how best to get there. I'm Emily Freeman, I'm the author of DevOps for Dummies and the co-curator of 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know.
I believe the next 100 years belong to us, and we will be measured by what we choose to do with them. The decisions we make right now will determine our ability to go further and faster than those before us. Rome was a civilization with which we're all familiar for good reason. It was one of the largest empires the world has ever seen. Spanning over 2000 years, its legacy continues to influence our daily life. Emperor Augustus founded the Imperial Roman Army, which peaked at a size of nearly half a million.
While its size at first glance is an extreme advantage. Size comes at a cost. Smaller armies of the time could forage, purchase, and even steal food. But Roman forces were simply too large for any of those options. The only way to maintain a distributed army of that size is to resupply it regularly, through a massive network of supply chains. To do this, Rome invested heavily in infrastructure, most specifically an extensive and well-maintained road system. Infrastructure is what separates Rome from its competitors. Now, lucky for us, software is much easier to maintain in large groups of humans. But infrastructure is still the differentiating advantage. And instead of roads, we have pipelines. Pipelines must not only be built well for scale in both capacity and extensibility but also maintained. And here's the really tricky part.
We aren't fortune tellers. There's no way for us to know when, how, or why our systems will need to scale. Like children, they grow and change in ways that horrify and delight us. We are at the will of a force. We have no control over the customer. How do we proceed? Because if you're anything like me, you have moments where you doubt yourself, questioning your talent or purpose, even your value. It's so much easier to become paralyzed by fear and uncertainty. Because if you can't possibly know how to proceed, how do we keep moving forward? I believe the first step is accepting that in modern software development, there is no beginning and end. We are in a constant state of motion, and part of that shift is showing the old way of thinking about our work. Last year, I pitched a radical new idea, a replacement for the SDLC, the software or systems development lifecycle, what we call the SDLC has been in use since the 1960s, and it's remained more or less the same over all those years. Each version is maybe slightly different. Different stages or steps. With Agile, we saw it bent into a circle.
With DevOps, we saw it bent into an infinity loop for that toolchain image. But across all those implementations, the SDLC has become an assumption. We don't even think about it anymore. And I know some of you might be questioning this thesis. Let me prove my point. When DevSecOps became the first derivative of DevOps, it sought to quote, move security left, which is great. It shows that security can be considered earlier in the process when we're planning and designing, and thinking. But that should show you the pervasiveness of the SDLC. That phrase is dependent on the reference to the construct.
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