[echelon]

Time and time again.

"Business should focus on its core competency"

* Outsource in-house infra to cloud. This begets lock-in as every engineer is doing heaven knows what with Lambda. Still need that huge infra team to manage AWS.

* Outsource in-house metrics and visibility to SignalFx, Splunk, DataDog, NewRelic, etc. Still need a team to manage it. Costs get raised by more than double because we're beholden, so now we need to fund 20+ engineer quarters to migrate everything ASAP.

* Feature flagging system built in house works like a charm and needs one engineer for maintenance. Let's fund a team to migrate it all to LaunchDarkly. Year+ later and we still don't have proper support or rollout and their stuff doesn't work as expected.

Madness.

Expensive madness.

SaaS won't magically reduce your staffing needs. Open source solutions won't reduce your staffing needs either, but they'll make costs predictable. As these tools become more prevalent and standard, you can even hire experts for them.