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Comment by jeremy_k | Hacker News Reader

I 100% agree with your second point. Case in point, my previous employer built an in house development platform to create ephemeral environments and run deployment pipelines for production. At the time, around 2016, there weren't many (or any? I wasn't part of the research time) options to buy this type of software. Today, there are more than a handful in this space.

I wonder at what point companies would finally bite the bullet and swap to buying? Maybe cataloging the feature set of the internal software, seeing what is a necessity, and seeing which vendors can cover those requirements?

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> Today, there are more than a handful in this space.

Really? I was a DevOps engineer a few years ago and can't really imagine a useful tool in that category so I'd appreciate a few names I could check out. While I've switched to frontend development, I'm still interested in CI/CD and just can't imagine any tooling being able to make it easier then what we had back then too (ephemeral envs using docker-swarm/k8s and pipeline triggers, basically)

Vercel, netlify, aws amplify, google app engine come to mind. Not sure if they’re strictly better than the setup you describe, but easier to get started.

… interesting.

So we went the "build-then-buy" route with Netlify. AFAICT in hindsight, what we built was more stable than Netlify, and had the same interface for devs, basically. (… and might have been operationally cheaper.)

(It's all moved to an -and-buy-another-different-thing-for-no-real-reason-other-than-different-people, now.)

Infrastructure automation tools like Pulumi or AWS CDK make this relatively straightforward... just deploy a new stack (or use the APIs to automate a deploy/test/destroy cycle.)

It's even possible with good old Terraform, used correctly.

https://releasehub.com/ (Disclaimer, first listed because I work here)

https://www.quali.com/

https://www.withcoherence.com/

https://webapp.io/

https://www.uffizzi.com/

https://www.qovery.com/

https://www.devzero.io/

These exist in the B2B space (and isn't an exhaustive list), there are a ton more in the B2C space

Time travel, time travel, wherefore art thou time travel.

When it comes to build versus buy, there are only right answers with hind-sight.

>> Maybe cataloging the feature set of the internal software, seeing what is a necessity, and seeing which vendors can cover those requirements?

Feature set is part of it. Longevity is another. (been relyinb on Google Reader lately?)

Cost us part of it (internal is usually more expensive, but not always.)

Flexibility is another - building up the knowledge and expertise helps morph the system to your needs, not the other way around.

I'd say it's mostly better to buy, you'll likely get much more for much less, but it comes at a cost beyond just money. Beware of things on your critical path, to which you are beholden to outside "partners".

All that said, I think developers err on the build side way more than they should.

Can you list some of the solutions that are out there now? I'm considering using one of them so I can have preview environments!

I replied to a sibling comment with a list of a few. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34166459

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