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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

A few problems with your comment -

1. 10% of your time doing devops work isn't necessarily a waste - if 10% of that time is cheaper than enterprise offerings, then this is probably worth the resources, unless you are very short on talent.

2. You have an assumption laden in this comment that SaaS products eliminate the need for spending time on "devops work." It can greatly reduce that time, but IME even administrating a SaaS product can come with a ton work - look at EKS, a "managed" kubernetes cluster, but often requires a lot of kubernetes know-how to properly configure and maintain.

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3. Managed solutions usually aren’t as configurable.

E.g. plugins

> 1. 10% of your time doing devops work isn't necessarily a waste - if 10% of that time is cheaper than enterprise offerings, then this is probably worth the resources, unless you are very short on talent.

That's not the right calculation for revenue-generating products (IME). The right calculation is: if your product got this 10% instead of you doing DevOps work, is the additional long-term revenue higher than the cost of the enterprise offering?

What is the X% of your product you're willing to outsource? What % of margin are you willing to give up for that capability? Because the hope/dream of every parasitic SaaS is to grow with their customers...

Having taken part in many build-vs-buy decisions, there are no easy answers. The overriding factors in most decision relate to the specifics of the business. Some very common reason for buy decisions:

- You don't actually know if this feature will be important long term

- You have many urgent needs, the opportunity cost of waiting for "build" to finish is too high

- Your company is, for various reasons, unable to attract and retain the kind of talent who could maintain a system of this complexity (I realize this sounds like "we're not willing to pay market reates", I promise it's more complicated than that)

Both your counterpoints are true, I didnt want to sprinkle the word “marginal cost” everywhere (marginal devops cost of buy vs self host). And ofc I agree, not all saas offerings are the same, EKS is fairly meh as far as setup and time savings.

If you do 90% dev and 10% ops, and we call that 'devops'... are you devdevops?

I am really puzzled by the terminology.

Let’s be honest, dev ops can be more than 10% when there’s no consistent way to tie in every open source project into an environment.

SSO helps, but it can still be work to roll out.

Proper zero-hassle managed software is Heroku. All it takes is money, and it's refreshing to realize how much your ops really cost.

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