Strategic Trade-offs

Frameworks for evaluating build-vs-buy, vendor choices, and organisational constraints.

Topics

Build vs buy

• Managed services vs self-hosted — a decision framework
• When PaaS beats Kubernetes

Multi-cloud and lock-in

• Deliberate single-cloud vs accidental multi-cloud
• Portable abstractions that actually work

Team topology

• Platform team boundaries that scale
• Stream-aligned vs enabling teams

Technical debt

• Modernisation without big-bang rewrites
• Measuring and prioritising architectural debt

Vendor and contract strategy

• Enterprise agreement leverage for architecture
• Exit strategies for critical SaaS dependencies