So why would anyone want to promote an approach that encourages constant change, when failure in the form of outages or breaches or large-scale processing errors exact such a heavy toll on businesses? The short answer is because some application domains require it, but that’s also a bit glib. Instead, let me bring in the concept of “anti-fragility,” as coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book “Anti-fragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.”

I explained the gist last week:

“Anti-fragility is the opposite of fragility: as Taleb notes, where a fragile package would be stamped with ‘do not mishandle,’ an anti-fragile package would be stamped ‘please mishandle.’ Anti-fragile things get better with each (non-fatal) failure.”

Anti-fragile systems benefit from variability and can take advantage of differences from the “normal” to ultimately gain value. Anti-fragile systems behave in such a way that failures due to change exact a small cost, but successful change drives exponentially higher value, so the system gains overall. Taleb argues this is only achieved by keeping the scope of each activity small enough that the downside risk is manageable (and results in strengthening the system), and that any gains can be maintained ongoing.

via Devops, complexity and anti-fragility in IT: Risk and anti-fragility — Tech News and Analysis.