# Build vs Buy: The Hidden Costs of “Just Building It” with Ahmed Bebars

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/build-vs-buy-the-hidden-costs-of-just-building-it-with-ahmed-bebars
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/build-vs-buy-the-hidden-costs-of-just-building-it-with-ahmed-bebars.md
Podcast: [Screaming in the Cloud](https://stenobird.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud)
Published: 2026-04-02T10:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/61da3a10
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/media.transistor.fm/61da3a10/779a033b.mp3
Processing state: processed
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/screaming-in-the-cloud/episodes/build-vs-buy-the-hidden-costs-of-just-building-it-with-ahmed-bebars
Duration seconds: 2575

## Resource

Engineering decisions shouldn't be based on what is possible to build, but on what is sustainable to maintain. Ahmed Bebars and Corey Quinn explore the long-term operational costs of custom infrastructure versus managed services.

## Highlights
- Main idea: The true cost of custom engineering is found in 'Day 50' maintenance, not the initial build
- Practical takeaway: Choose managed services like ECS over EKS when your scale doesn't yet justify the operational overhead of Kubernetes
- Failure mode: Building custom solutions that create 'tangled' environments where local testing no longer mirrors production
- Business lesson: Prioritize focus on your core business by avoiding the trap of reinventing infrastructure components
- Technical warning: Avoid tight subnet constraints and IP exhaustion by designing for expansion or adopting IPv6

## Topics

Cloud Infrastructure, Kubernetes, AWS ECS, AWS EKS, Software Maintenance, Build vs Buy, Network Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering

## Chapters
- 1:00 — The Journey to Community Contribution: Ahmed discusses overcoming imposter syndrome and the value of sharing technical knowledge through open source and community work.
- 10:35 — EKS vs ECS: Choosing the Right Scale: A discussion on why the New York Times uses ECS for their current scale and the importance of situational technology decisions.
- 20:10 — Home Lab Reality Check: Comparing the stability and maintenance of personal K3s clusters to enterprise cloud environments.
- 23:15 — The Long Game of Build vs Buy: Analyzing the hidden costs of maintenance, personnel turnover, and the financial impact of extended support in AWS.
- 29:50 — The Complexity of Serverless Governance: The challenges of managing and governing large-scale architectures consisting of thousands of individual functions.
- 39:30 — Networking, Subnets, and IPv6: The pitfalls of manual network configuration and the ongoing debate surrounding IPv6 adoption.

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## Transcript

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