Build vs Buy
Differentiation versus table stakes, priced over five years.
5 to work through
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intermediate
How do you decide whether to build or buy a capability, and what makes the decision reversible?
2 min answer -
intermediate
In February 2022 Akamai announced it would acquire Linode for about $900 million and closed the deal in March 2022 at a purchase price of $898.8 million, adding an infrastructure-as-a-service business to a company that already ran one of the largest edge delivery networks. Akamai had the network, the capital and the engineers to build compute. What made buying the right call, and where would copying this be a mistake?
3 min answer -
intermediate
What evidence should drive a build-versus-buy decision, and which arguments on each side are usually made badly?
2 min answer -
advanced
A B2B commerce platform must decide whether to build its own logistics network or partner. What should drive the decision beyond cost?
2 min answer -
advanced Multiple choice
A platform must decide whether to build its own routing and dispatch optimisation or buy a commercial service. What decides it?
2 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Build versus Buy
Whether to build a capability or acquire it — decided primarily by whether the capability differentiates, not by whether you could build it.
practiceStrategic Sourcing Decision
A build-versus-buy decision framed around competitive differentiation and organisational capacity rather than a comparison of visible costs.
metricVendor Reversal Cost
The engineer-months needed to unwind a buy decision - dominated by business logic that leaked into the vendor's configuration rather than by anything…
Neighbouring topics
Business Architecture
General material on the business side of architecture.
Business Capabilities
What a business does, stated stably and independent of implementation.
Capability Mapping
Overlaying systems onto capabilities to expose duplication and gaps.
Business Processes
How work actually flows, including the handoffs nobody documented.
Value Streams
End-to-end delivery of an outcome, and where the waiting happens.
Domain Boundaries
Where the language of the business changes, and services should too.
Stakeholder Analysis
Who is affected, what they need, and who can block you late.
Product Thinking
Treating platforms and services as products with users and a lifecycle.
Business KPIs
The numbers a design is ultimately judged against.
Regulatory Constraints
Non-negotiable requirements that remove design options entirely.
Organisational Constraints
Team structure, skills and budget cycles as architectural inputs.
Time to Market
The constraint that dominates most products, and how to trade against it.
Business Cases
Expressing an architecture proposal in the currency that gets funded.
Operating Models
How delivery, platform and governance functions fit together.
Team Topologies
Stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem teams.
Platform as a Product
Adoption earned rather than mandated, with an owner and a roadmap.
Outcome Measurement
Knowing whether the thing you built achieved what it promised.
Portfolio Prioritisation
Choosing between investments with incomparable benefits.
Business Continuity
What the business does while the system is unavailable.