Full-stack or engineering-only: choosing your deployment mode

The real question isn't "build or buy"

Every team evaluating a platform like this eventually asks some version of "should we run this ourselves or let them run it." The more useful framing isn't build versus buy, since the build itself is the same either way. It's who operates the infrastructure underneath a data product once it exists: your cloud and your team, or a managed environment.

Signals you're a good fit for engineering-only

• You already have a platform team maintaining cloud infrastructure, IAM and network policy, and adding one more managed system to that surface is more overhead than value.
• Security or procurement requires everything to run inside infrastructure you already control and can audit end to end.
• Cost needs to show up on your own cloud bill for chargeback or budgeting reasons, not as a separate vendor line item.

Signals you're a good fit for full-stack

• There's no dedicated data platform team, and standing one up isn't the point of this project.
• Speed to a working first product matters more right now than infrastructure ownership.
• You'd rather point at a validated, monitored product than provision and maintain the compute, storage and orchestration underneath it.

Mixing both is normal

These aren't a one-time, company-wide decision. It's common to keep a handful of sensitive products engineering-only, on infrastructure your security team already reviewed, while letting less sensitive ones run full-stack. The manifest and the proof a product ships with are identical either way, only who operates the compute underneath changes.