[dan353hehe]

> Here’s the thing, if your core business function depends on some capability, you should own it if at all possible.

If I'm building something that allows my customers to do X, then yes I will own the software that allows my customers to do X. Makes sense.

> They’ll craft artisanal monitoring solutions while their actual business logic—the thing customers pay for—runs on someone else’s computer.

So instead I should build an artisanal hosting solution on my own hardware that I purchase and maintain? I could drop proxmox on them and go from there, or K8s, or even just bare metal and systemd scripts.

But my business isn't about any of those things, its about X. How does owning and running my own hardware get me closer to delivering on X?

[wrs]

The OP's point is that if your monitoring solution dies, your customers don't even notice, so you shouldn't build it yourself. But if the service running your actual business logic dies, your customers get cut off, so you should build and maintain that part more directly. (And obviously this is a spectrum — you probably don't need to design your own CPU.)

[onion2k]

if the service running your actual business logic dies

In a modern tech business that's everything from the frontend to the database though, including all the bits to keep that running at scale. That's too much for most companies to handle when they're starting and scaling. You'll need to compromise on that value early on, and you'll probably persuade yourself that it's tech debt you'll pay off later. But you won't, because you can't, and that will lead you to dislike the system you built.

It's much simpler and more motivating to accept that in any modern tech business has to rely on third parties, and the fact you pay them money means they probably won't screw it up. It has to be an accepted risk or you'll be paralysed by having too much to do.