Build vs Buy
Lately I picked-up the topic of "Build vs Buy" and engaged in thorough contemplation about the factors that potentially influence the decision-making process.
I have some initial and raw thoughts on "Build vs Buy" that I aim to extrapolate. To gain a broader perspective, I plan to gather insights from the wider community regarding the following points.
Additionally, by sharing these thoughts with a larger community, I hope to uncover any overlooked aspects.
Here are some thoughts comes to my mind when we want to make a choice or a decision to buy or build. Sometimes it's a tricky call to make a choice between building something in-house verses buying from outside and if mistaken then it would have long-term consequences. Wrong decision would cost you for wasted efforts, time and money!
Build vs Buy decision is heavily depends on broader criteria like :?specific needs, resources and long-term objectives.?Having said, we must weigh important factors (e.g. cost, customization, time to market, vendor lock-in, future proofing) based on criteria defined.?
Alright, let's look at the thoughts comes to my mind and I request you may pick up any one (or all) to expand upon and share your thoughts.??
1?? Are we building something that will potentially have positive & long term impact? Mostly around ROI perspective…?
2?? Building something in-house is also depends on staffing bandwidth, skills
3?? Building something in-house and side effects of "at that time" factor from technology perspective.
4?? Leveraging open source to make build vs buy decisions
5?? By building, are we digging a rabbit hole for us?
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6?? Are you building something that reduces downtime?
7?? Buy something at reasonable cost and then build upon it?
8?? Platform engineering is next wave (in fact it's already there!) … how it will affect build vs buy decisions?
9?? How ChatGPT or AI in general will influence the buy vs build decisions??
?? Buy vs Build decisions are also influenced by size of company, team, security demands, TCO (cost) so it doesn't really matter if you build or buy, monitoring & controlling total cost of ownership (TCO) and thinking from vendor lock-in perspective is important aspect.?
1??1?? From whom to hear??Top-down or bottom-up?
Below question is more inclined to those "decision makers" who made such decisions several times in their career.
As an experienced decision maker, how your maturity level expanded over the time as far as making a wise decision w.r.t. buy vs build? (any lesson you learned would help future decision makers to learn from experts like you! )
Thank you for reading and certainly would greatly appreciate your valuable inputs and insights/feedback/participation.
Sr. Manager, DevOps Engineering at GoTo
1 年One aspect that you touched on which (in my mind at least) needs some elaboration is customization of purchased solutions. There are a handful of cases where purchased products are genuinely turn-key, but the vast majority of the time there is real engineering work that goes into getting the system (whatever it is) operational and integrated. The closer the feature set and design of the product is to a perfect fit for the application, the less work this will be (generally speaking). What that implies is that there is a threshold of effort in setup / customization where it actually takes *more* engineering work to buy than it does to build. And even before that tipping point, there's a temptation to exclude the engineering costs associated with buying from the cost comparison. The other thing to say about that engineering work associated with buying is that it's usually not a one-time cost - in virtually all cases, there will be ongoing work. And as a general rule, the extent of that work will be proportional to the amount of customization that was necessary for the initial setup.