Cloud Outages Spotlight Fragile Software Supply Chains: Experts Advocate Visualization and Resilience Strategies

Recent widespread outages on AWS and Azure have refocused industry attention on the often-overlooked fragility of software supply chains. Beyond manufacturing, software relies on a complex ‘runtime supply chain’ encompassing everything from operating systems and hypervisors to data center infrastructure, electricity, and water. This intricate web of dependencies leaves systems vulnerable not only to third-party outages but also to ransomware, data corruption, and information leakage. Distinguishing from reliability (system trustworthiness) and robustness (availability), resilience emerges as the critical capability for systems to respond and recover from unexpected ‘perturbations’—be they malformed inputs, infrastructure failures, or an empty DNS file, as seen in a recent AWS incident.

Addressing these vulnerabilities requires proactive strategies, beginning with visualizing the entire supply chain. Techniques like Wardley Mapping, which charts value chains from customer to foundational utilities, allow organizations to analyze trade-offs between control and effort, identifying critical dependencies and potential failure points. Event Storming, a collaborative method championed by Alberto Brandolini, makes tacit knowledge explicit by modeling domain events, actors, and systems using sticky notes, fostering a shared understanding of process flows. Furthermore, bolstering resilience involves rigorous testing—beyond behavioral tests—through stress testing to understand failure modes, and adopting practices like Chaos Engineering, pioneered at Netflix, which injects controlled disruptions into live systems. Complementing this, Observability 2.0 emphasizes designing instrumentation and telemetry into systems from inception, empowering development teams to monitor and understand system behavior at scale. By visualizing dependencies and actively testing resilience, organizations can transform fragile towers of code into robust, antifragile systems.