Governance in the Age of AI: A Conversation with Sarah Wells
इससे जुड़ी जानकारी
Governance in the Age of AI: A Conversation with Sarah Wells
In this podcast Michael Stiefel spoke to Sarah Wells about the relationship of governance to software architecture. Governance enables teams to work effectively by establishing procedures that minimize system complexity, improve security, and reduce repetitive tasks. Targeted checklists help engineers by reducing the stress over these procedures. This is especially critical in high pressure situations like critical incident response. Architecture should focus on the technical decisions that are difficult to reverse.
The conversation then shifted to exploring the relationship of governance to agentic AI software development. While AI can be very effective for writing code, building internal tools, and automating tasks, experienced engineers still need to validate tests, review outputs, establish clear architectural guidelines, and demand that the AI agents be hypercritical of their own work. With the focus on AI software development, architectural skills are at a premium. Talented individuals that demonstrate architectural skills need to be found and sponsored.
Key Takeaways
- Governance enables teams to work effectively by creating guardrails that reduce complexity, increase security, and diminish repetitive work.
- Platform engineering teams foster good governance by using targeted checklists so that developers easily remember crucial steps. While this is important for procedural situations such as security, it is vital in pressure situations such as critical incident response.
- Architecture should focus on the decisions that are difficult to reverse while being flexible with decisions that can be undone. These latter decisions can often be made without a great deal of analysis.
- AI agents can be very effective for writing code, building internal tools, and automating tedious tasks. Nonetheless, they still need experienced human engineers to validate tests, outputs, establish clear architectural guidelines, and demand that AI agents be hypercritical of their own work.
- In a world where AI agents can write code, architectural skills become critical. Potential architectural talent needs to be actively sought out and sponsored.
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Transcript
Michael Stiefel: Welcome to the Architects Podcast, where we discuss what it means to be an architect and how architects actually do their job. Today's guest is Sarah Wells, who is a technology leader, consultant, and conference speaker, with a focus on engineering effectiveness, microservices, incident management, platform engineering, optimizing for flow, and technical strategy. She has over 20 years experience as a developer, principal engineer, and tech director across product, platform, SRE, and DevOps teams.
She spent over a decade working at the Financial Times as it transformed from 12 releases a year to more than 20,000, embracing autonomous, empowered teams and adopting microservices, DevOps, containers, and platform engineering.
She's the author of the O'Reilly book Enabling Microservice Success: Managing Technical, Organizational, and Cultural Challenges. It's great to have you here on the podcast, and I'd like to start out by asking you, were you trained in any area of architecture? It's not something you decided one morning, you woke up and said, "Today I'm going to get involved with architecture".
Getting Interested in Architecture [01:54]
Sarah Wells: I think it happens the same way for a lot of software engineers is you start off and you're just doing a small part of a system, and you get a very tight spec, you know, at junior, and then as you get more senior, you start to think more widely. And then at some point, you basically go, why are we doing this this way? This doesn't seem sensible. And that's the point where you start to be thinking architecturally. You've had enough experience to recognize things that seem to be good choices and things that were bad choices and to basically feel the frustrations of decisions that were painful and hard to undo. So, I think that's how I've seen people move into architecture. It's certainly the way it worked for me. Although I never officially had an architect title, I definitely started to care about those decisions and to really want them to be made well.
The Intersection of Governance and Architecture [02:42]
Michael Stiefel: But then you sort of transitioned or took the perspective of governance looking at this? How did those two things mesh together? Was it a fight or was it a cooperative endeavor?
Sarah Wells: So, what happened was I was a principal engineer leading the team that built the content API at the Financial Times, and we were adopting microse…
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