Introduction

There is a big open problem in Software Development practices costing enterprises enormous effort and resources: compliance.

Enterprises are stuck in the 70s, or somewhere that feels a lot like it.

Usually, every single time a new application or a new feature is ready for production, the team owning the solution is supposed to facilitate and wait for the outcome of several processes, like risk assessments, security assessments, infrastructure, and architecture reviews, and so on.

That is a slow and frustrating set of processes. It puts a lot of pressure on the centralized functions focused on guaranteeing quality and respect for regulations while blocking the release of new features for the business units focused on their customers’ needs.

A new hope

The core objective of Fractal Architecture is to untangle these processes.

Through Fractal Architecture, your centralized functions and Centers of Excellence will be able to collaborate and create Blueprints that can be reused freely and automatically by any team whenever needed.

This process will create a library of compliant by-design set of infrastructure components and services configured and connected in a specific way that has already been deemed compliant; Blueprints ready to be used off-the-shelf.

By adopting Fractal Architecture, your Centers of Excellence, Communities of Practice, Guilds, etc., will be able to define and keep updated Blueprints and Interfaces, the Fractals, with compliance built-in.

Your development teams will then be able to use the right Fractal for the job, using compliant Blueprints and extending them through its Interface operations.

Any interested party in your organization will now always be able to know which components are used, how they are used, and by who.

Development Teams’ external dependencies are minimized, making "doing the right thing" the simplest choice while giving the ability to improve the existing Fractals (or create new ones) as an asynchronous process to Software Development.

Choosing the right Automation Engine is key

To be successful with adopting Fractal Architecture, you need a specialized Automation Engine: Fractal Cloud Fractal Cloud is an application-driven multi-cloud management platform.

Until now, cloud infrastructure automation tooling has been focusing on automating the work needed to be done by infrastructure teams. With Fractal Cloud, we make the infrastructure teams redundant.

We have decided to adopt an application-driven approach, as opposed to the infrastructure-centric used as standard until today, because every single business does not need to know how to instantiate, optimize, secure, update and operate infrastructure.

Instead, we can build on top of state-of-the-art and battle-tested components, approaches, and patterns, without needing to reinvent the wheel.