The Balance between Flexibility and Constraints

Operations in the real-world is hard. Designing and maintaining scalable systems is hard. Keeping pace with business desires and innovation is challenging.

In systems engineering, flexibility provides opportunity and an ability to keep pace with the dynamics of the real-world, while accepting constraints simplify the implementation. Successful designs offer flexibility through simplicity, while eliminating constraints. The challenge is to embrace the balance of both (pick constraints to guide the implementation, and pick where to draw the line with the system’s flexibility), while maintaining open roads for future scaling.

Embrace the tradeoff.

Constraints can be taken as “requirements”, or “specs”, while flexibility can enable the evolution of the system as time progresses (and as those specs change).

Yes, we can have the best of both worlds.