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Photo by Divyadarshi Acharya on Unsplash
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Today's Meditation: There is no free lunch.
If someone is trying to sell you a "silver bullet" solution/platform - something that they claim is faster/cheaper/easier - you need to stop and ask some deep and probing questions - of them, and of yourself.
How open/available is access to their documentation and training for their platform?
Is their source code available to you, as a customer (i.e. think risks to your own business continuity)?
Are they willing to put their source code in escrow - to include all of the DevOps scripts that would be needed to automate standing-up your own instance (i.e. if they were to cease business operations)?
How frequently can you obtain full data extracts (and, what will be ongoing costs to keep a recent/fresh extract updated)?
What are you giving up?
What risks are being transferred to you?
What choices are being taken away?
What are the unintended consequences of the trade-offs being made?
What will you do if that company goes bankrupt?
How will you recover your data?
How will you replace/rebuild the functionality their platform delivered?
How quickly can you recover/replace that business functionality (and data) - if they were to cease operations tomorrow?
Even if you did obtain a guarantee of source code being held in escrow - how long would it take you to assemble an engineering team and configure the required infrastructure resources to self-host the solution?
Is it even feasible for you to test this apocalyptic scenario - on a regular basis?
And, if someone is dismissive of these kinds of concerns - or, dismissive of your architects who may raise them - you should really pause and ask what is their true agenda.
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