Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
3 days ago
- #SoftwareInfrastructure
- #CloudOutages
- #BuildVsBuy
- The article discusses the 'Build vs Buy' dilemma in software infrastructure, using recent outages (Cloudflare, GitHub, AWS) as examples of the risks of relying on complex, abstracted services.
- A key rule is presented: own and build the capabilities that are core to your business to maintain control and differentiation, while buying non-core solutions.
- The 'Infrastructure Trap' warns against over-reliance on cloud providers with opaque layers of abstraction, which can lead to uncontrollable outages and debugging challenges.
- The recommended approach is to build what delivers your unique value and buy everything else, especially solved problems like error monitoring or SSL certificate management.
- The article emphasizes understanding the systems you depend on, whether built or bought, to ensure you can fix them when they fail, avoiding the helplessness seen in recent outages.