Create Vs Consume

From our company’s history of deploying technology and working with many teams, there have only been a handful of companies and teams that have understood the create vs consume mindset. So what do I mean by this? As a development team, you are either creating your platforms, processes, solutions, etc to build your products or you either consume technology that has already done the work for you and all you have to do is bring your code.

DevOps is hard enough. The problem with the create mentality is that it brings on more decisions your team has to make as well as wasted time and resources. For example, if you are building your own platform to be able to develop your applications, you will run into tool overload, more needed engineers, lack of standardization, and many more complexities. One huge hurdle the industry faces with creating is that it is unique to your organization. What happens when the lead developer leaves? Or when you need to onboard a new team member? The lack of consistency and transparency is costing organizations thousands of dollars if not millions by not focusing more on code and the things that matter to your organization and customers…your product!

So, how do you move towards consumption of solved solutions that fits your team? As a team, decide what are the specific team and industry requirements and work with the right vendor that provides the best practice solution that allows you to consume everything needed out of the box. The big benefit here is that you will most likely not have to manage the platform and stay bogged down with the upkeep of tool configuration, pipelines, etc. Fortunately, there are many emerging technologies rising to solve the create vs consume problem and there is a great chance there is a vendor that will meet the majority of your needs.