There has been a recent boom of powerful off-the-shelf tools that allow non-programmers to build and operate software systems that can run a business.

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2024-12-02 19:30:03

There has been a recent boom of powerful off-the-shelf tools that allow non-programmers to build and operate software systems that can run a business. There are some big advantages to using these tools - folks closer to the business domain can build solutions, you can prototype products to find product-market fit without investing heavily in tech, and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, to name a few. However, everything comes with tradeoffs, and there’s one in particular I want to highlight - when you store your data in a third party, you don’t control how you get to interact with it.

There are some obvious downsides to this. First, you may need a view of the data that just isn’t available. Or, you may want to write the data in a way that isn’t possible - perhaps a batch update for performance reasons. This may force you to replicate the data, and operate on a shim application that sits in front of the third party tool.

This gets to a downside that can be very, very costly - third party tools force you into a distributed system early on, and can necessitate that you build more components and data stores in the distributed system than your org really needs.