Transcript Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Jesse DeRose.Amy: I’m Amy Negrette.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we’ve seen AWS used and abused in the wild. With a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today, we’re going to be talking about build versus buy. I feel like this is really kind of a classic engineering conversation. Amy, what is the build versus buy idea?Amy: It’s really the idea of whether you decide to use a managed service or SaaS product versus rolling your own and building yourself. It’s very easy to do these days with a few watches on YouTube, maybe some blog articles. You can also do repairs on my house, which is why I always have to get repairs done on my house. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh]. Yeah, I feel like as much as I love the world of HGTV and the DIY network, I think I can do more than I actually can and I feel like it’s probably a lot safer to just let a professional take the reins. I mean, there’s so many certification programs that teach you how to build and manage your own engineering things, your own distributed databases, your own Kubernetes clusters, your own streaming data platform, and it’s really great to understand the fundamental building blocks of these systems, it’s really great to understand how they work so that ultimately if you are consuming from them or managing them, that you understand the ins and the outs of the system. But the question becomes, do you really need to be the one that’s managing that system? Do you really need to be the one spending your time managing that system on top of writing code for your microservices, on top of managing the architecture, the application, all of the components of your service that are critical?Amy: So, I guess what we really want to decide is, in what use cases is it okay to build something from scratch, and when is it okay to, essentially, just go to the market and look for something that’s made already?Jesse: Yeah. And I think that’s the main question that a lot of folks ask: what is the defining line? What are the questions they should think about as they are choosing to build versus buy?Amy: I think if you want to really look at building a product, and really from the ground up—you have this product in mind and you want to do all the architecture, control it end-to-end—unless this is your core product feature or you’re going to package it for either internal or public release, you almost always—you don’t want to build this yourself because someone has probably built it in a way that’s not going to cause your engineers time or money. Unless it is going to directly make you money, then yes. If this is tied to your product income and your product revenue, please build it yourself. It avoids a lot of licensing issues, you do get to control how it works, how you want it to work. But that said a lot of products, just a bunch of assassins in a trench coat anyway, so—Jesse: [laugh].Amy: —it really depends on what’s important to you.Jesse: Yeah, I feel like this is one of the biggest pitfalls that I see in a lot of organizations where they think about how they want to build out an architecture and they choose that a solution like, stateful distributed service is going to be the right thing that they want. And one of the developers says, “Oh, that’s easy. I can build that in a weekend.