The metric CTOs never look at: the average age of infrastructure debt
A CTO watches uptime, team velocity, and the monthly cloud bill. Those three are easy to watch: they update themselves, they have dashboards, and they compare month over month without anyone building anything.Now try to answer a different question from those same three dashboards. For each production environment, how long has it been since it last matched the definition it was built from? Uptime cannot tell you. Velocity measures the code your teams ship, not the infrastructure they stopped touching. The bill goes up when things are neglected, not down, so it does not even point in the right direction.That question has a measurable answer, and almost nobody measures it.
