You are moving to the cloud with your product. The architect is making sure all web servers are load balanced, containers orchestrated, elastic, automatic fan out, fan in, automatic fail over across multiple regions and Availability Zones. Database is getting clustered, replicated. The whole nine yards. The architect, rightfully, has sold the vision of an ops environment that cannot have a single point of failure. You have given him the full authority to execute on that vision. In a big enterprise, there is very little consensus on things. This is one of the few things that everyone agrees on. That, if you are serious about continuity of your business, in your architecture, there can be no single point of failure. You agree with it. Good for you.
Now consider this. Away from the vigilant eyes of the DevSecOps’ monitors and scanners, away from the cloud and the humming servers, you have a product team working away on the next big thing. In the team, you have Subject Matter Experts (developers, network engineers you name it) who work in silos. Now, imagine this. In the team, there is one SME, John or Jane, who owns a significant component or data pipeline and has solely worked on that for several years. S/he has so much domain knowledge about the piece s/he owns that it is not funny anymore. What happens when John or Jane goes on vacation? Any work on that component stops. Your project manager becomes extra religious for those few days, praying for zero hot fixes in that piece of code, for no one else in the team can pick up the John or Jane’s burden of work. The poor guy (or gal) cannot even fall sick in peace. Oh, and what happens if they just decide to quit? Would you consider John or Jane as a single point of failure?
If your team is going through the rigors of Agile Transformation, here is one more thing to watch out for. Collectively take some time out with the team and identify extent of this silo-ization. Then come up with a plan to organically cross pollinate some of the domain knowledge. Your team will, eventually, thank you for this. In the coming months (years?), we would cover some of the strategies we may use to break down these silos.