Describe a situation where you had to decide between a "Build vs. Buy" strategy.

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Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Our team was looking at how we handled outbound emails for a project. We were
sending a lot of transactional stuff, password resets etc.,

Initially there was a push from the team members to build our own email service.
It seemed simple enough as the engineers believed setting up few SMTP servers
with an outgoing message queue should be sufficient. It will save money for the
company that would be spend in buying the services from external service
providers.

But having worked in a similar scenario before, I knew that managing IP
reputation is not as easy. If you end up on the blacklist of the service
providers, our flows would break. This will result in undesired issues and
impact customer reputation.

So we decided to buy the services of external service provider but wrap their
APIs with our own internal microservice. This in turn will decouple the risk of
changing the external service providers in the future.

It worked out really well. We got the reliability of a massive vendor without
the headache of maintaining mail servers. And because we owned that internal
wrapper, we knew we could always just swap out the underlying provider later on
if they ever raised their prices too much.

Anonymous · Answer

We had an internal debate about our email notifications setup. We were scaling
and the old way of sending emails were not sustainable as it has delivery
inconsistencies.

Some of the team members wanted to build an email delivery service in house. On
the surface, it seemed straightforward. You setup some SMTP services and build a
queue for your service and it should be done.

But I have experienced issues where your IP gets flagged by the email service
provider and it can end up in blacklist. To avoid, we would need to dedicate
partial capacity of an engineer on an ongoing basis to take care of the mail
servers.

So I pushed for an external provider but also insisted on building a wrapper
around the provider's APIs so as I did not want our application code to be
directly coupled to a specific vendor's API. So we created an internal
microservice which can interface with the external provider's API

The solution worked out well for us. We found a reliable way to send emails to
our customers. And since we had the internal wrapper, we could always swap out
the vendor if the prices changed in the future.

Describe a situation where you had to decide between a "Build vs. Buy" strategy.

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