Build vs Buy - The Ultimate Software Dilemma
The "build vs. buy" debate is a common topic in the software industry and is especially relevant for automating Infrastructure as Code (IaC). As companies progress toward IaC maturity, they must choose between building their software solution or adopting a dedicated platform.
Many organizations already use tools like GitHub Actions (GHA) or Jenkins for automation, extending them to manage IaC. While this has its advantages, it also introduces challenges, particularly at scale.
In this post, we will briefly discuss the advantages and drawbacks of build vs buy, building software solutions versus adopting specialized platforms, focusing on the seven key challenges of managing IaC at scale with general automation tools, and how dedicated platforms like env0 can address these challenges.
IaC in Short
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become a foundational practice in cloud infrastructure, allowing teams to define, automate, and consistently deploy environments through code.
By eliminating manual processes, IaC reduces errors, accelerates provisioning, and ensures uniformity across environments. Popular tools like Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, and others have emerged as
The Trade-offs of Building vs. Buying Software
The build vs. buy dilemma—deciding between building in-house custom software or purchasing off-the-shelf solutions—carries significant implications for cost, control, and team workload. Building in-house software offers full customization but requires a large initial investment and extensive time, as developing a complex solution-based platform may take 12 to 18 months across multiple stages, from setup and integration to analytics development.
This prolonged effort to create, maintain, and scale a custom solution can place a heavy burden on DevOps and platform teams, often referred to as the "DevOps tax," representing the hidden cost of time and resources needed to maintain, troubleshoot, and update these homegrown solutions.
This build vs buy decision becomes clearer when we examine the distinct advantages and trade-offs of each approach.
This prolonged effort to create, maintain, and scale a custom solution can place a heavy burden on DevOps and platform teams, often referred to as the "DevOps tax," representing the hidden cost of time and resources needed to maintain, troubleshoot, and update these homegrown solutions.
This decision becomes clearer when we examine the distinct advantages and trade-offs of each approach.
Build vs Buy Comparison
A ready-made solution reduces operational strain by transferring updates and maintenance to the vendor, providing faster time-to-value (TTV) with a full suite of ready-to-use features. In contrast, building an in-house solution means starting from scratch, demanding substantial internal time and resources. While ready-made solutions may slightly limit customization, they deliver immediate value and efficiency—a worthwhile trade-off for scaling organizations.
The following table breaks down the key factors to consider when weighing the build vs. buy decision:
Building an in-house software solution offers full control and addresses specific business needs but requires high upfront investments, slower TTV, and ongoing maintenance.
Build vs Buy - What's More Cost Effective?
When assessing total costs, building an in-house software solution requires an estimated $350k to $500k in development costs over seven to twelve months, with the ongoing maintenance adding some additional incremental expenses over time. In contrast, a comparable vendor-provided solution typically costs between $30k and $100k a year.
To illustrate how these two costs play out over time, the chart below shows the total cost of ownership (TCO) over four years, factoring in a conservative 12% annual maintenance cost for in-house solutions (~1% of the initial development cost per month) and an above average $65k annual license fee for vendor-provided solutions.
This scenario simplifies, of course, but it highlights a broader truth: most DIY solutions take years to recover their initial investment—often a period that exceeds the system's useful lifespan.
And so, as requirements evolve, organizations are frequently compelled to rebuild systems every few years to keep pace with new demands. This leads to a constant (and costly) development cycle, where each iteration comes with substantial upfront costs.
In contrast, a vendor-provided solution evolves continuously, consistently offering new capabilities driven by market demands and customer needs. What’s more, with modern pricing models, these new features often come at no additional cost, as many providers adopt billing-per-usage structures and deliver ongoing improvements to boost usage and ensure customer retention.
Moreover, if needs change drastically—as they sometimes do—vendor solutions can be easily switched, without the concern of sunk costs associated with in-house development, which makes them more cost-effective.
IaC Build vs Buy: Challenges of Managing IaC with General CI/CD Software Development Tools
Many companies start their IaC journey with general CI/CD tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or BitBucket. While useful initially, these tools present challenges as infrastructure scales, including limited scalability, governance gaps, and rising complexity.
Designed to run isolated tasks, they lack a holistic view of cloud environments with complex lifecycles.
Managing IaC pipelines with general CI/CD tools diverts engineers from strategic work, slows time-to-market, and leads to rising usage costs as automation scales.
Teams often face rising usage-based costs for runners and pipeline executions, which increase with growing automation needs. In-house automation efforts may also miss out on established best practices, leading to inefficiencies that a dedicated platform could address.
Key Challenges
In the next section, we’ll explore a few key challenges associated with managing IaC using general scripting tools:
- Standardization and consistency
- Slow lead time to change
- Code drifts
- Policy enforcement
- Access control
- Cost management
- Visibility and auditability
- IaC monoliths
Let’s look into these challenges and how dedicated platforms like env0 can effectively address them.
Standardization and Consistency
When teams build automation processes in-house, a lack of standardization across teams and environments leads to inconsistent workflows and configurations. This complicates infrastructure management and increases the risk of errors, particularly when managing updates like version changes.
Teams also frequently create workflows from scratch for repetitive tasks, failing to adhere to the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle, which results in wasted time and effort and adds to inconsistencies.
How env0 can help:
Platforms like env0 serve as a single source of truth for managing Infrastructure as Code (IaC), providing centralized control over policies and automation workflows. env0’s self-service model enables developers to deploy infrastructure quickly using predefined workflows, reusable templates, and variables, ensuring consistency across environments while reducing repetitive tasks in line with the DRY principle.
Misconfigurations, such as drifts or security vulnerabilities, are handled through custom policies deployed organization-wide and additional features. These policies, configured using the Open Policy Agent (OPA) and supported by plugins like Checkov and Trivy, ensure security and consistency across all deployments.
Slow Lead Time to Change
A lack of standardization often results in delayed implementation of changes. Many companies measure this as the "lead time to change," a key metric for determining how quickly teams can implement updates. Without consistent processes, teams frequently create new workflows from scratch, slowing progress and increasing the risk of errors.
The burden of building these capabilities typically falls on the DevOps teams, creating bottlenecks and further slowing the process as they must dedicate significant time to internal development.
How env0 can help:
env0 provides a comprehensive platform that continually evolves with new features and capabilities to meet both current and future infrastructure needs. With built-in standardization and self-service deployments, developers can manage infrastructure independently, securely, and confidently, reducing the load on DevOps.
Advanced automation features, such as automated plans on pull requests (PR), workflows, and custom flows, effectively enhance reliability, streamline processes, and reduce bottlenecks. This leads to improved efficiency and faster execution.
Code Drifts
Drifts are one of the most common causes of production headaches, uptime hiccups, and unexpected cost escalations. In systems that are not centralized or properly governed, the likelihood of drift increases significantly.
Without proper controls in place, developers may make changes outside of the standard workflow, often in a rush or without knowledge of internal processes. These changes are not always reflected in the central state file, leading to inconsistencies that can have serious consequences.
How env0 can help:
env0 not only enforces proper work standards through policies and custom roles for role-based access controls (RBAC) to prevent unauthorized changes, but it also includes an automatic drift detection mechanism.
This mechanism continuously monitors for deviations and immediately alerts teams when drift occurs, enabling quick identification and remediation of issues.
Policy Enforcement
Policies are a critical gap in organizations that use DIY tools. Lack of centralization and control, as well as insufficient RBAC, hinders the proper introduction and enforcement of policies. Without these safeguards, organizations face the risk of unplanned cost spikes due to unauthorized or misconfigured deployments.
Furthermore, failure to implement strong policies can lead to security vulnerabilities, breaches in compliance standards, and, in the worst-case scenario, expose the company to legal liabilities and performance issues.
How env0 can help:
env0 places policy implementation at the core of its governance offering. Not only does env0 allow users to introduce and enforce custom policies, but it also connects various signals and telemetry, such as approval workflows and cost thresholds, to make policies more efficient and adaptable to different scenarios.
Policies can be as simple as preventing unnecessary spending or as complex as requiring specific approvals for certain actions. env0’s flexibility allows for the removal of unnecessary guardrails, making policies granular and customizable.
Features like estimated costs and cost thresholds provide extra control, ensuring both security and effective cost management across the organization.
Access Control
Access control is worth mentioning separately due to its significant potential impact on security, compliance, and operational integrity. Improperly configured role-based access (RBAC) can expose critical infrastructure to unauthorized users, leading to security breaches, compliance violations, and business disruptions.
Managing access is particularly challenging in DIY systems, where organizations must maintain a secure database of roles and permissions without a dedicated tool.
Implementing external tools to manage access often comes with significant direct and indirect costs, resulting in many organizations struggling to implement access management effectively.
How env0 can help:
env0 offers a built-in, robust role-based access control system that enables organizations to manage access securely and efficiently.
With env0, teams can define who has access to specific parts of the infrastructure and control the actions they are allowed to perform. This granular control, extending down to the project and environment level, ensures that only authorized users have the necessary permissions.
env0 also integrates access control into its broader governance framework, creating a comprehensive rule set that manages both who has access and what they can do with it. By centralizing access control, env0 minimizes the risks of unregulated access while ensuring compliance, security, and operational integrity across the organization.
Cost Management
While IaC is a significant factor in cloud costs, tracking and managing these expenses can be challenging and inefficient when relying on homegrown automation. Organizations sometimes use cloud provider tools and manual tracking, but these methods are often inadequate and don’t fully address the complexity of managing IaC costs.
Without real-time visibility and automated controls, managing budgets effectively becomes a difficult task that can easily lead to unplanned cost spikes and inefficient resource use.
How env0 can help:
env0 provides a complete suite of cost management features designed to give teams control over IaC expenses. With cost estimation before deployments, precise tracking of spending per project and environment, and automated budget notifications and enforcement, env0 allows teams to proactively manage their IaC-related cloud costs.
It also integrates with FinOps tools, helping organizations align IaC with their broader FinOps strategy, ensuring cost efficiency and budget compliance within their cloud infrastructure.
Visibility and Auditability
As organizations scale, achieving complete visibility into IaC operations becomes increasingly complex. It’s critical to not only ensure smooth operation but also to trace activities for compliance and troubleshooting. While organizations often use external systems to manage logs, forwarding them consistently and standardizing them across teams can become a major challenge.
DIY solutions typically complicate this, making it difficult to maintain an effective audit trail and consistent logging practices.
How env0 can help:
env0 acts as a centralized repository for IaC activities, ensuring logs are standardized and consistently delivered across teams and tools.
By providing built-in mechanisms to export logs and present them in user-friendly dashboards, env0 streamlines the tracking of infrastructure changes and the maintenance of audit trails for compliance. The platform allows teams to identify issues quickly and maintain oversight across all environments, reducing the operational complexity of managing logging systems.
IaC Monoliths
As organizations scale, their IaC often becomes monolithic, making management increasingly complex. Although these monoliths are created to maintain cohesion, they tend to lead to growing dependencies, making troubleshooting and changes more difficult.
The larger the monolith, the greater the risk of errors and negative impacts, as fixing issues in one area can unintentionally cause problems elsewhere. This increases operational risks and slows down development efforts.
How env0 can help:
env0 helps break monoliths by introducing a flexible project hierarchy, allowing teams to manage their projects and environments granularly. Advanced automation features like workflows and custom flows enable effective dependency management, allowing teams to troubleshoot locally without affecting the broader system.
By isolating potential issues, these features reduce disruptions and ensure smoother operations. This approach minimizes operational risks, enhances agility, and speeds up change implementation, improving system reliability and resilience.
So, should you build or buy?
The "build vs. buy" decision is a common challenge for growing organizations. Building your own software solutions offers complete control and customization but requires significant resources and ongoing maintenance.
On the other hand, buying a dedicated platform allows for faster implementation and less operational overhead, though it may reduce flexibility.
When it comes to Infrastructure as Code, many teams start with in-house or general-purpose automation tools. While effective in the early stages, as infrastructure scales, teams often encounter the challenges described above.
At this point, organizations may need to make the build vs buy decision-making process and evaluate whether continuing with in-house solutions or transitioning to a dedicated platform is the best path forward.
With advanced migration features, moving your workspaces to env0 is now simpler than ever, enabling your team to effectively tackle IaC challenges and achieve scalable infrastructure management.
To learn more about how env0 helps leading organizations automate and scale their IaC with confidence, schedule a technical demo today.
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