A build-versus-buy decision chooses between developing a capability internally and procuring it externally. Start with the value required by developers, internal customers, and business stakeholders, then assess whether the capability creates competitive advantage. section 6.3
Evaluate the decision against practical constraints:
- Prefer buying when the capability is not differentiating; consider building when reducing vendor or cloud-provider dependence is strategically important. section 6.3
- Include licensing, project health, support, training, security patching, scaling, on-call work, storage, ingestion, query, and regulatory-retention costs. section 6.3 section 5.6.1
- Treat open-source components and open standards as ways to build selectively while limiting vendor lock-in. section 6.3
Observability platform
Buying a frontend or all-in-one may accelerate feature delivery and incident resolution. Building a backend from scratch is usually hard to justify because reliability and scalability can require years; integrating open-source backends and a frontend can be a more practical internal platform. section 6.3 section 5.6.1
