Build vs. Buy in the Midst of Armageddon
summary
A 10-person SRE team collapses to 3, rebuilds an in-house incident tool Riot (Go), and discovers rapid commit churn, hidden maintenance costs and a single-point-of-failure that eats time instead of reducing incidents; after six months the build yields more bugs than value. The team pivots, scores vendors against a spreadsheet, buys Brutely, and within a quarter shifts to weekly Ops KPIs, company-wide adoption and real incident output instead of unpaid engineering polish. 10→5→3
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 4:35Junk drawer team reality
- 11:40Building Riot and SPOF
- 17:21Tooling costs and ego
- 20:36Pivoting to buy
- 23:29Layoffs and team changes
- 27:40Cultural shift with PagerDuty
- 29:23Leaving good roads
- 31:31Accept reality before building
- 32:15Q&A
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