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> use 3rd party SaaS services for everything OTOH didn't Facebook just demonstrate why building everything in-house is dangerous?

• whynotmaybe 5y ago
  If you use a saas for login, one for business process A, one for business process B, C, D,... if just one of these fail, you might be at risk of losing business and huge amount of money for something you have no control on. You are lowering you cost but by doing so, you are increasing your risk. Furthermore, by using external saas, some business will have a tendency to get rid of some IT people to "really" save on cost which means you'll lose manpower for when something happens. Software development has changed in the last decade and now everybody knows that they have to take failure into account when building software. Chaos Monkey opened the eyes of a lot of It people. There should be some "MBA" level chaos monkey solution.
• Raidion 5y ago
  Dangerous is a word that doesn't actively justify trade-offs. With SaaS offerings, you're trading opex costs to save on capex costs, which can mean a really big difference in terms of opportunity costs. You also are paying for the expertise that you'd need to develop internally otherwise. These aren't simple black and white choices. Operating at FB level scale means that saving 2% on your cost of revenue is billions of dollars. If this is the only "Big" outage FB has for the next 2 years, and it's saved them billions of dollars, isn't the fairly small risk of a single point of failure worth it? You have to accept some risk, and it's often hard to compare risks on the business side vs risks on the technical side.