I’m on my flight back from AWS re:Invent, and my mind keeps returning to a central theme that ran through Dr. Werner Vogels’ keynote: Simplexity. The concept—acknowledging that truly scalable, resilient systems require a balance of simplicity and complexity—felt like it hit the sweet spot for many organizations I advise. It resonated with the challenges I see daily in companies aiming to modernize: they know they need to evolve, yet often find themselves tangled in the details of distributed systems, cloud-native infrastructures, and SaaS transformations.

What is Simplexity? It’s the idea that building for the future doesn’t mean chasing simplicity at all costs, nor does it mean stacking complexity without purpose. Instead, it’s about embracing desired complexity—the kind that drives scalability and innovation—while ruthlessly pruning undesired complexity that sneaks in and stalls progress.

Desired vs. Undesired Complexity
Think of desired complexity as the foundational, well-understood elements you need to run large-scale distributed systems. Techniques like fine-grained microservices, event-driven architectures, and partition strategies can be complex under the hood, yet they’re essential for elasticity, fault isolation, and long-term adaptability. These intentional complexities help your business deliver features quickly, handle seasonal spikes, and recover gracefully from failures.

Undesired complexity is what slows you down. It’s codebase bloat, tangled dependencies, and opaque architectures that force teams into firefighting mode. This sort of complexity doesn’t scale; it distracts teams from innovation, throttles feature velocity, and can quietly balloon operational costs.

Spotting Undesired Complexity
Before turning to the tools and patterns that AWS and other industry leaders champion, it’s important to recognize when complexity has gotten the upper hand. Warning signs include slowing feature releases, frequent escalations to resolve issues, and a sense that the code is drifting away from anyone’s full understanding. These signals often show up in “tech-second” industries—organizations where technology supports rather than leads the business. When leaders see these flags, it’s time to take action.

Techniques for Achieving Simplexity
Dr. Vogels emphasized principles that I regularly help my clients adopt:

1. Model Systems on Business Concepts:
   Align your architecture with real-world business domains. When you do this, systems become more intuitive to evolve over time.
2. Hide Internal Details:
   Make sure that external consumers (other services, teams, or business units) interact through well-defined interfaces. This reduces interdependencies and lets you change things behind the scenes without creating ripple effects.
3. Adopt Cloud-Native Patterns:
   Whether it’s embracing serverless, container orchestration, or managed data services, leverage AWS offerings that shift complexity into managed layers of the stack. It’s not about removing complexity, but putting it where it can be better managed.
4. Failure Isolation & Observability:
   Design so that when one part fails, it doesn’t bring down the entire system. Invest in observability—logging, tracing, metrics—so you can quickly diagnose problems. Effective observability makes complexity feel less daunting because you can see exactly what’s happening inside your system.
5. Break Down Complexity Into Manageable Units:
   Techniques like shuffle sharding and partitioning by customer ID aren’t just clever patterns—they’re proven methods to limit the blast radius of failures and keep complexity contained.
6. Automate the Mundane:
   Offload repetitive, non-judgment-based tasks to automation. By integrating CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and automated testing, you push complexity into predictable, repeatable scripts. This frees up human talent to focus on innovation rather than grunt work.

Empowering Teams Through Ownership
None of this sticks without cultural alignment. Smaller, autonomous teams owning their piece of the puzzle can drive both simplicity and resilience. When teams feel agency—control over their technology decisions and the urgency to deliver—they tend to build systems that are intuitive to operate and easier to evolve. Leaders, in turn, should step back enough to let teams run, but keep a foot on the gas, ensuring focus and momentum remain high.

Where to Begin
For executives unsure where to start, the key is not a massive overhaul on day one. Instead:

• Identify one friction point, one system, or one domain that’s causing headaches.
• Begin chipping away at undesired complexity—perhaps by refactoring a legacy monolith into a few well-defined services, or migrating a high-maintenance database to a fully managed AWS offering.
• Engage with your teams and partners who understand distributed systems and SaaS mindsets. Their guidance can prevent you from inadvertently swapping one form of complexity for another.

A Pragmatic Path Forward
Simplexity isn’t about making everything easy—no truly scalable, robust architecture is trivial. It’s about owning the complexity that matters and shedding the rest. By focusing on intentional design, leveraging the capabilities of cloud-native services, and cultivating a culture of ownership and continuous improvement, executives can set their organizations on a path to build systems that evolve gracefully.

AWS re:Invent reminded me that while technology moves quickly, the core principles remain clear. As technology leaders, our role isn’t to eradicate complexity altogether—it’s to harness it. By applying Simplexity, we help our organizations thrive amid change, rather than get bogged down by it.

Thanks for reading. Now go build!