Stack Decisions & the MDS Reckoning — Week 4 CheckWeek 4 of Data Platform System Design: build-vs-buy, bundling-vs-unbundling, and what survived the modern-data-stack correction.

The modern-data-stack era (one best-of-breed tool per layer) ended in a 'reckoning' (Handy, Stancil, Reis). The structural critique:

Build-vs-buy for a platform component should hinge on:

eBay went vendor → in-house for analytics; countless startups went in-house → vendor. Both were right because:

A platform migration megaproject (LinkedIn's analytics stack, Uber to GCP) survives on one non-technical artifact:

'The platform team's product is the paved road.' Operationally that means success is measured by:

The senior-most system-design instinct this whole cohort trains: