Third-party services, composite availability, build or buy
Every third-party service added to a critical journey makes it more fragile, and that risk is a product call. You learn to estimate how much availability you lose when several vendors are chained together, plan a degraded mode, weigh vendor lock-in and argue a build-or-buy choice.
Lesson objective
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to calculate the availability of a journey that depends on several services, specify a degraded mode for each non-essential dependency, assess vendor lock-in and argue a build or buy decision based on total cost.
Topics covered
- third-party dependencies
- composite availability
- graceful degradation
- build vs buy
- vendor lock-in
Where it fits
Data, load and dependencies
Where does the data live, what will give way first under load, and what happens when a vendor goes down?
Lessons in this module
- Where does the data live, and when is it up to date?
- Handling the load, finding the bottleneck, deciding on a cache
- Third-party services, composite availability, build or buy (this lesson)
What you will learn in this module
This lesson is part of the course Read and challenge a technical architecture
- Assess data choices (source of truth, transactions, replicas, consistency), scaling and caching, and spot the bottleneck of a user journey.
- Assess dependencies on third-party services (composite availability, degraded mode, vendor lock-in) and a build or buy decision.
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