Technical Debt Risk: Review SWA, the FAA and Twitter Outages

Technical debt, a term once reserved for IT professionals, has gained broader attention following high-profile outages at organizations like Southwest Airlines, the FAA, and Twitter, highlighting the critical risks it poses to businesses. The discussion with Bob Quillin, Chief Ecosystem Officer at vFunction, explores these failures in detail, revealing that technical debt can lead to significant operational disruptions and financial losses if left unmanaged. Southwest Airlines faced issues due to outdated systems, whereas the FAA's monolithic architecture led to a cascading failure, and Twitter's coding mistakes highlighted the challenge of maintaining agility while managing accumulated technical debt. Quillin emphasizes the importance of understanding technical debt through effective measurement and management strategies, advocating for cloud-native architectures and microservices to enhance resilience and agility. He suggests that companies should proactively address technical debt to avoid catastrophic failures and improve business agility, using tools like vFunction to assess and modernize application architecture, thereby aligning IT investments with business objectives.