I would have thought the risks from 3rd party production dependencies would make devs do all in their power to minimize them. But IIUC it's a somewhat common practice.
Is there something about the market dynamics that make this a reasonable tradeoff? E.g., the problems are rare and this somehow allows faster time to market?
(Asking as a systems programmer, very much not a web developer.)
I don’t have any data but I really don’t think it actually is that common. I definitely heard it used a lot more in the 2000s jQuery era but not really today. Browsers even have isolated storage these days so the benefits really are infinitesimal.
Tell that to any developer (not just web) that outsources everything these days e.g. authentication, storage, analytics, database, etc - you name it.
They think it's less risk (and this includes managers and directors in larger companies). Apparently in-house would take forever, cost more and be unable to maintain anything these days.
I don't get it either but it's the current train of thought / trend and is not tied to individual developers.
Yep. Entire teams work on these products. You have a couple of options:
1. Use them
2. Make it internally with less staffing, resulting in an inferior product
Option 2 is viable if you really only need a small subset of features/deep customization, but if you run into the edges the problem space will explode on you. At that point, you either have to throw more resources at it or go 3rd party.
I also miss being able to host random CSS and assets on Tumblr.
Otherwise, it should be on my own CDN. Especially for enterprise sites.
Meanwhile, that third-party is effectively paying your bandwidth bill: You might want to trade some reliability in exchange for a lower bandwidth bill, but you should wonder why exactly that third-party is willing to pay your bandwidth bill at all.