Micro Designed Infrastructure

Technology decisions are difficult and consequential – at times they decide the success or failure of a project. Often the complexity is so high that best-practice approaches from similar projects get adopted, even though their context is a different one. The result: decisions that fit neither the application nor the company. “Micro Designed Infrastructure” (MDI) is our approach for developing optimal, comprehensible and company-wide accepted technology stacks, borrowing from design thinking.

The principle

Two approaches make complex problems tractable: a structured process, and splitting the big problem into smaller, more clearly solvable parts.

Design thinking provides the process: people from different disciplines jointly develop an understanding of needs and contexts and derive repeatedly tested solutions – through the steps of empathising, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing.

Microblocks provide the decomposition: a microblock is a part of an IT service decoupled from other blocks, with a clearly defined function, standardised interfaces (REST, SQL, DNS …) and independent changeability – similar to microservices, but taking enterprise, operations and data contexts into account.

MDI applies design thinking to these microblocks: the specific requirements are derived from each block’s context – with fewer but essential requirements, the right technology decision becomes easier. It is important to consider every functional part: beyond the application modules also access and PKI management, DNS, service discovery, monitoring, logging and backup.

The process

1. Setup: an interdisciplinary team spanning IT management, architecture, development, operations, information security and data protection.
2. Empathise: decompose the IT service into microblocks, understand process and data flows – together with software architecture.
3. Define: per block, capture interfaces, data, processing, monitoring, plus development, operations and company requirements.
4. Ideate: develop several technology options per block and challenge them constantly (e.g. with the 5-whys method) for objectivity.
5. Prototype: automated from the start, with health checks and automated security checks.
6. Test: assemble the service from the microblocks, verify functionally and under load – failures lead back to the appropriate process step.

The outcome

Applied consistently, microblock clusters emerge on a shared technology base – because similar contexts lead to the same decisions. What grows is a highly efficient infrastructure built from a few core technologies, whose decisions are documented and comprehensible to everyone.

MDI replaces neither software architecture nor microservices, DDD or DevOps – it complements them with exactly the aspect they leave open: structured, context-driven technology decisions.