Build vs Buy: Should You Build or Buy a Kubernetes Platform?
Kubernetes has emerged as the go-to orchestration tool for managing containerized applications. As per a survey conducted by Portworx with around 500+ Kubernetes experts, 58% of the organizations are planning to move some of their VM workloads to Kubernetes, 65% of the organizations are moving their VM workloads to Kubernetes on an urgent basis and 80% of the organizations plan to completely go with Kubernetes in the next five years. However, when it comes to adopting Kubernetes, organizations face a critical decision: Should they build their Kubernetes platform in-house, or should they invest in a third-party Kubernetes-native solution, such as Devtron?
In this blog, we will explore the pros and cons of both approaches to help you make an informed choice that best suits your organization’s needs.
Building a Kubernetes Platform In-House
Building a Kubernetes platform from scratch can be tempting, especially if your team has technical expertise and control over configuring the platform. Let’s break down the pros and cons of building an in-house Kubernetes solution.
Pros of Building a Kubernetes Platform In-House
Full Customization and Control
Building your Kubernetes platform allows you to tailor the environment to your specific use cases and business requirements. This means you can control every aspect — from custom integrations to fine-tuned configurations — allowing maximum flexibility to fit your development processes and workflows.
Adaptation to Unique Business Needs
If your organization has specialized infrastructure needs, you may find that no off-the-shelf solution is an exact match. For example, if you need to deploy hyperledger fabric in Kubernetes, you might not find a lot of platforms catering to this use case. By building in-house, you ensure that your Kubernetes platform is aligned with your unique workloads, data handling requirements and security policies.
Avoid Vendor Lock-In
Relying on third-party solutions can sometimes lead to vendor lock-in, especially if a platform becomes a key part of your CI/CD pipeline. By managing your own Kubernetes platform, you retain independence and avoid potential challenges when switching vendors down the road. Additionally, if the vendor you choose for your platform doesn’t have flexibility and support, it might be a challenge to switch from the existing one.
Skill Development and Expertise
For organizations with dedicated DevOps and development teams, building a Kubernetes platform offers a great opportunity to cultivate deep expertise in Kubernetes, cloud-native tooling, and automation. This knowledge can benefit other areas of infrastructure and platform management but there are some considerations associated with it such as dedicated investment in building the platform.
Cons of Building a Kubernetes Platform In-House
Significant Time and Resource Investment
Building a Kubernetes platform is far from a plug-and-play solution. It requires time, effort and expertise across various domains, including security, monitoring, logging, scaling and networking. The time spent on building and maintaining the platform could be diverted to other core business activities.
Maintenance Burden
Managing a Kubernetes platform is not a one-time effort. The team must stay up to date with new releases, security patches and emerging best practices. Additionally, ongoing maintenance includes troubleshooting, scaling and ensuring the platform remains resilient and secure. Kubernetes is one of the most active CNCF projects with a release frequency of three projects in a year. With every release, there are enhancements, deprecations and features. Moreover, making sure the platform is compatible with it, is another big overhead.
Divert Resources
A big catch to building an in-house platform is that resources must be diverted from gaining a competitive advantage over peers. Instead, focus and investment are inclined toward building the platform, which might affect business requirements.
Delayed Time to Market
While building a platform allows for customization, it may delay time to market. Developing a robust platform that includes all necessary integrations and automation could take months or even years, which could impact how quickly your teams can deliver applications to production.
Talent Dependency
Kubernetes’ expertise is in high demand and finding or retaining skilled professionals to manage your custom-built platform could prove challenging. If key team members leave the organization, knowledge gaps may cause operational issues, especially during critical incidents.
High Initial Cost & Maintenance
Building a platform needs the right expertise and resources to understand the Kubernetes infrastructure and build on it. Initially, it can cost a high amount of investment in terms of time and money to hire the right talent. Going further, it can also prove expensive to make sure the platform is compatible with the Kubernetes versions, features and deprecations, catering to the organization’s requirements.
Buying a Kubernetes Platform
Purchasing a managed Kubernetes platform like Devtron can provide a streamlined, out-of-the-box solution with several built-in features for container orchestration, CI/CD, monitoring and more. Here’s a closer look at the pros and cons of buying a Kubernetes platform.
Pros of Buying a Kubernetes Platform
Faster Time to Market
Buying a platform ensures that a quick spin-up of the infra and platform enables your team to get started as quickly as possible. This allows your team to focus on developing and deploying applications without spending time architecting and maintaining the underlying platform.
Reduced Operational Overhead
Devtron and other managed platforms handle much of the heavy lifting associated with Kubernetes management. Features like auto-scaling, DecSecOps practices, policies and governance, right access management for Kubernetes and monitoring are included, allowing your team to focus on business-critical tasks rather than maintaining infrastructure.
Better DevEx
Buying a platform ensures a better developer experience since the provider has been working on improving the overall platform. Thus, you can get a tailored platform for better developer experience and collaboration among teams.
Built-In Best Practices
Managed platforms incorporate industry best practices, ensuring that your Kubernetes environment is set up optimally for security, scalability and performance. Devtron, for instance, already comes with CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows and multi-cluster management.
Support and Documentation
Most managed platforms provide comprehensive support and documentation, which can be a significant advantage. Additionally, these platforms also conduct training sessions, making sure the users benefit from support and robust documentation, making it easier to troubleshoot issues or onboard new team members.
Cost Efficiency
Buying a Kubernetes platform can be more cost-effective than building one, particularly for smaller organizations as well as larger organizations, which lack the manpower and expertise to manage a large-scale Kubernetes infrastructure.
Cons of Buying a Kubernetes Platform
Limited Customization
While third-party platforms offer a wide array of features, they may not allow the same level of customization as a homegrown solution. Some organizations may find that their unique use cases are not fully addressed by a pre-built solution. If the platform and the team are flexible enough to build it for your use-case, it can be a huge advantage but most of the platforms don’t offer this kind of flexibility.
Potential Vendor Lock-In
Relying on a managed Kubernetes platform means you are dependent on the vendor’s roadmap, pricing structure and future availability. This might make things harder if you plan to switch things or re-engineer your architecture.
Subscription Costs
The cost of a subscription or license for a managed Kubernetes platform could increase over time as your infrastructure scales. For organizations with significant workloads, this could lead to higher operational expenses compared to an in-house solution, especially if you can manage scaling internally.
Important Considerations for Buying a Kubernetes Platform
While buying a platform comes with its cons, they can be mitigated with awareness during shortlisting the platform.
Choosing a Customizable Platform
Choose an extendable platform so that as you grow, and your requirements change over time the platform can adapt to your requirements.
Build on Industry Standards
No product is without vendor lock-in, including a home-grown platform, but a platform built on industry standards gives you more flexibility and options. Therefore, a platform that has OSS ethos and is based on industry standards can offer you flexibility similar to a home-grown platform.
Conclusion: Which is Right for You?
The decision between building or buying a Kubernetes platform depends largely on your organization’s needs, budget and expertise.
If your company has specialized requirements and a team capable of managing the complexities of Kubernetes, building in-house may give you the customization and control you desire. However, for most organizations, especially those looking for faster deployment times and reduced operational complexity, buying a customizable solution like Devtron, which is built in the open with open core philosophy using industry standards, can offer the best of both worlds.
Ultimately, the question boils down to your long-term business goals: Do you desire full control at the cost of increased management, or are you looking to offload platform maintenance to a trusted vendor, freeing your team to focus on innovation? Whichever path you choose, Kubernetes is here to stay — and choosing the right platform can make all the difference in driving success for your cloud-native applications.
To learn more about Kubernetes and the cloud native ecosystem, join us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, in Salt Lake City, Utah, on November 12-15, 2024.
