Build vs Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You

Recent major outages at Cloudflare, GitHub, and AWS highlight a critical decision framework for engineering teams: build what delivers your core business value and buy everything else, but prioritize solutions with minimal abstraction layers. Complex cloud platforms create dependencies on systems too opaque to debug effectively. When infrastructure fails, teams built on thin abstractions can diagnose and resolve issues, while those dependent on massive platforms become helpless. The key is understanding your systems well enough to fix them when they inevitably break, rather than outsourcing both infrastructure and the ability to troubleshoot it.