Technology Evaluation Criteria
A standing set of dimensions for assessing a candidate technology, ensuring that operability and longevity are weighed alongside capability.
Technology choices are frequently made on features and benchmarks, which are the dimensions that matter least over a decade of ownership.
The dimensions worth scoring, roughly in order of long-run importance:
Fit for the actual requirement, tested against your workload rather than a vendor benchmark — public benchmarks are constructed to favour the publisher.
Operational burden — what running it well costs in engineer-days per year: upgrades, backups, scaling, monitoring, on-call.
Team capability — what the team knows now and what it would take to become competent. A technically superior option the team cannot operate is the worse choice.
Ecosystem and longevity — community size, release cadence, commercial backing, and the hiring market. A technology with a shrinking community becomes a liability whatever its merits.
Exit cost — how hard it would be to leave, which is the honest way to reason about lock-in.
Total cost of ownership, including licences, infrastructure and the engineering time above.
Security and compliance posture, including how quickly vulnerabilities are addressed.
Two guardrails: prefer boring technology for anything not differentiating, because novelty spends innovation budget that is better spent on the product; and evaluate with a spike against your own workload, since the decisive difference is nearly always found in operating it rather than in reading about it.