Note: The following is an extract of the transcript from an interview I gave in 2018, after my talk at the Centiq Experts Forum that year. It’s also published on the Centiq blog and more recently reproduced on my LinkedIn. Photo by Marc Newberry on Unsplash.

What are snowflake servers and why does this happen?

This is a term that comes from the Visible Ops Handbook (you can read more about it on Martin Fowler’s blog) – and essentially it’s the problem where, over time, the processes around your IT infrastructure become inconsistent. So, the reasons that choices were made becomes lost as different people manage different systems — and trying to keep them alive becomes a real manual, and therefore error-prone, process.