[spectraldrift]

You make a good point about experience. I've noticed an interesting paradox there.

The engineers who most aggressively advocate for bespoke solutions in the name of "simplicity" often have the least experience with their managed equivalents, which can lead to the regrets you mentioned. Conversely, many engineers who only know how to use managed services would struggle to build the simple, self-contained solution the author describes. True judgment requires experience with both worlds.

This is also why I think asking "do we actually need this scale?" is often the wrong question; it requires predicting the future. Since most solutions work at a small scale, a better framework for making a trade-off is:

* Scalability: Will this work at a higher scale if we need it to?

* Operations: What is the on-call and maintenance load?

* Implementation: How much new code and configuration is needed?

For these questions, managed services frequently have a clear advantage. The main caveat is cost-at-scale, but that’s a moot point in the context of the article's argument.

[sethammons]

I boil it down to:

How will this scale? How will this fail?

I like to be able to answer these questions from designs down to code reviews. If you hit a bottleneck or issue, how will you know?