I hate the current trend of smearing your business logic across dozens of third-party providers with various business goals that rarely align with yours.
I'm also not confident that the constant churn of keeping up with API changes (if not outright deprecations like this) and costs of the third-party services end up costing you more than just doing it yourself.
Finally, what we've seen with Okta, Twilio, most recently MailChimp (which was used to attempt to attack DigitalOcean customers among others) clearly shows that these companies aren't magic and may not actually be any better than doing it yourself when it comes to security.
>I hate the current trend of smearing your business logic across dozens of third-party providers with various business goals that rarely align with yours.
I'm also not confident that the constant churn of keeping up with API changes (if not outright deprecations like this) and costs of the third-party services end up costing you more than just doing it yourself.
I suppose the problem is that it's hard to evalute the total cost of ownership. Migration to a 3rd party and operations costs can be reasonably forecasted, but how do you evaluate business or product continuity risk? Without being able to evaluate that risk, the 3rd party service always seems artifically "cheap."
Can you buy insurance against vendors dropping their services? I've licensed some tech before that included statements that if the company were to go out of business, the code would be open sourced so as to not leave people high and dry.
One issue is that the bigger you become, the more interesting you are as a target to break. So if you're a small company using a big company as a vendor, you've probably introduced a weaker link.
But if you're still small as a SaaS, trust is an issue to acquiring customers. I'm wondering where the sweetspot is.
I'm also not confident that the constant churn of keeping up with API changes (if not outright deprecations like this) and costs of the third-party services end up costing you more than just doing it yourself.
Finally, what we've seen with Okta, Twilio, most recently MailChimp (which was used to attempt to attack DigitalOcean customers among others) clearly shows that these companies aren't magic and may not actually be any better than doing it yourself when it comes to security.