What Does "Owning Your Tech Stack" Really Mean?

I wanted to go over a technical misunderstanding that a client of mine had recently.

They were a non-technical founder in logistics that offered deliveries and returns for fashion brands.

And they received advice saying that they should “own their entire tech stack.” 

So they interpreted this as them needing to self-manage everything. This included deploying open source solutions onto infrastructure that they owned.

Later on, things broke, and they called my consultancy in to fix issues from their setup. 

When I asked them why they chose to self-manage it instead of using a managed service like AWS, they relayed the advice they had been given to me.

That’s when I realized that they had misinterpreted that advice, which caused them to make the wrong technical decisions. This outage that we fixed was one example of that.

So today, I wanted to discuss what owning your tech stack really means and when it makes sense to self-manage your own infrastructure.

What Does Owning Your Tech Stack Mean?

Ownership over your tech stack means having control over your future technical decisions. This means things like owning the accounts your infrastructure is built in and owning the codebase and IP.

But this doesn’t mean you have to build everything from scratch.

For example, if you used AWS to manage your queueing service, you might not own the underlying queue implementation in AWS, but you still have control over how the queue is used and how it’s deployed.

In this case, the client thought that they had to get involved in the details of how the queue is implemented and deployed, which is why they tried to manage their own queue.

When Should We Directly Manage Our Infrastructure?

For most startups, I would try to use the equivalent managed service in a cloud provider like AWS as much as possible because it takes less time to set up and it’s more reliable since someone else is managing it. 

However, the few cases where I think it is worth managing your own infrastructure include:

• Compliance - when you have data security needs that require you to own everything, including the infrastructure underneath

• Cost savings - when managing your own infrastructure yields significant savings over using managed services

• Fine-grained control - when you must be able to tweak certain settings and configurations for your infrastructure that managed services won’t allow

However, most businesses don’t need this level of control, and are better off outsourcing the infrastructure. In this case, they would still “own” their tech stack, but it’s managed by another party.

Conclusion

Owning your tech stack doesn’t mean you necessarily must own the underlying infrastructure beneath it.

Consider which parts of your technology deliver the most value for your customers, and focus your attention on that. Use managed services for everything else.

For our client specifically, after fixing the bug in their self-managed service, we are now in the process of moving their infrastructure to a managed service in AWS.

This will significantly reduce maintenance costs and make sure client facing outages don’t happen again in the future.

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