Your infrastructure is a garden
Software systems are alive. They grow, break, adapt. The question isn't whether they'll change — it's whether anyone is paying attention when they do.
15 January 2026The metaphor nobody uses
Most teams talk about infrastructure like it’s a building. You lay a foundation, stack blocks, finish the roof. Done.
But buildings don’t grow. They don’t evolve. They don’t break differently at scale than they did at launch. Infrastructure does all of these things.
A garden is a better metaphor.
What gardens and systems have in common
A garden is alive. Left unattended, weeds take over. Soil erodes. Plants compete for light. What was once orderly becomes tangled.
Infrastructure works the same way. Dependencies age. Certificates expire. Configuration drifts from what’s documented. Logs fill up disks. One service starts consuming more memory than it used to, and nobody notices until something else runs out.
None of this is a failure. It’s biology. Living systems change over time. The question is whether anyone is paying attention.
Tending versus building
The building metaphor encourages a “build it and move on” mindset. Ship the feature. Deploy the service. On to the next thing.
The garden metaphor encourages something different: ongoing attention. Regular weeding. Seasonal pruning. Watching for early signs of disease.
In infrastructure terms, this means:
- Regular dependency updates before they become security vulnerabilities
- Monitoring that detects drift — not just downtime, but slow degradation
- Periodic review of what’s running and whether it still needs to be
- Documentation that’s maintained, not just written once at launch
The cost of neglect
Gardens that nobody tends don’t just look bad. They stop producing.
Infrastructure that nobody tends doesn’t just get messy. It becomes fragile. Every deployment gets riskier. Every outage takes longer to diagnose. Every new team member takes longer to ramp up because nobody can explain why things are the way they are.
The cost isn’t dramatic. It’s gradual. A little slower each month. A little more painful each quarter. Until one day someone says “we need to rewrite everything” — which is the infrastructure equivalent of bulldozing the garden and starting over.
The alternative
Tend to it. Regularly. Consistently. Not heroically — just attentively.
The best infrastructure teams aren’t the ones who perform dramatic rescues. They’re the ones where nothing dramatic happens, because someone was paying attention all along.
Your systems deserve a gardener.