Loose coupling helps to reduce toil

One way Cloud Native practices reduce toil is through the use of loosely coupled components and microservices architectures. When components in a system are tightly coupled, it is more difficult to change one component without also affecting another (Spurin, 2025). This reduces the overall operability and resilience of the system, and leads to technical debt and unnecessary toil.

A personal example I've seen of this involved complex F5 BIG-IP iRules which tightly coupled business logic into the load-balancing layer. This tight coupling led to incidents, and required special considerations, workarounds, and manual testing during code deployments and OS upgrade cycles.

References

Spurin, J. (2025, January). Kubernetes Certified (KCNA) + Hands On Labs + Practice Exams. Udemy.

Remember, one of the key guidelines for a cloud native application is that we can make high impact changes frequently and predictably, with minimal toil.