,
6 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
I am wholly against this mindset. It downplays the operations and maintenance burden assumed by building something yourself. Looking at TCO, it's almost always a better option to accept the 80% fully-managed-service solution than take on all the extra burden of a custom build
By building something yourself—and even before that, setting up infrastructure like k8s b/c you're *planning* that you'll want to build things yourself—you're spending resources on technology problems. You should instead by looking for ways to keep focus on business problems
Say a provider is lacking a feature that you want in order to build some business value. First question: can you work around it, using fully managed svcs? The answer is usually yes. It often takes some duct tape, but my experience says it almost always still works fine...
...and "fine" is almost always acceptable. But suppose it's not, and you can't create this business feature with existing managed services. The next question is, what's the opportunity cost of building it yourself? It's a lot of work, both upfront and ongoing...
...what else could you be building with that time? How much other business value could you provide by setting that goal aside and coming back to it when provider offerings have improved?
To sum up: I think this sentiment runs afoul of "perfect is the enemy of good". When making the choice of build vs. buy, always keep an eye on TCO, opportunity cost, and above all, delivery of business value
