To deliver software faster and more reliably, engineering teams use two key practices: infrastructure as code (IaC)and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD). IaC replaces manual infrastructure management with version-controlled code, while CI/CD automates testing and deployment through orchestrated pipelines. Together, they are essential for modern DevOps.
Research from the 2024 State of DevOps Report shows that elite teams who fully embrace these automation practices deploy more frequently, have shorter lead times for changes, and recover from incidents faster than their peers.
However, if you lead a platform engineering or DevOps team, you’re probably asking yourself a critical question: Should we build and manage our own IaC CI/CD pipelines, or should we buy a commercial solution that integrates with our existing workflows? This “buy vs. DIY” decision is not merely a technical one; it’s a strategic choice with profound implications for cost, speed, scalability, and your development team’s ability to focus on its core mission.
This article addresses real-world costs, such as the time, effort, and risk associated with each approach, to help you make a decision that aligns with your company’s needs and strategic priorities.
DIY: Building it yourself
A “Do-It-Yourself” (DIY) approach to IaC CI/CD means your team assembles, integrates, and maintains a set of open-source or disparate DevOps tools to create a custom workflow. This typically involves scripting together tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, and Spinnaker, plus various IaC languages like Terraform or OpenTofu.
DIY means managing everything from source code integration and environment provisioning to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Why do teams choose to build in-house?
The primary motivators for a DIY strategy are control and flexibility. Engineers can create custom workflows that perfectly align with their given needs and integrate them with internal systems. For unique infrastructures, a custom system can be the only way to achieve precise integrations.
Avoiding commercial licensing fees also makes going in-house initially appear cheaper to budget-conscious leaders. Companies also often prefer leveraging their own internal expertise and DevOps talent, confident they can build and manage these systems effectively on their own.
What it takes to do this well
While a perfectly tailored solution sounds ideal, the DIY path introduces significant challenges.
The initial build demands a large investment from your senior engineers, pulling them away from core product development. However, long after the initial setup, teams will need to deal with managing this “second product,” with constant maintenance required amidst other issues:
- Tool and plugin updates: The DevOps tools ecosystem changes continuously, requiring your engineers to handle updates, security patches, and deprecated features.
- Pipeline drift due to a lack of central governance: As different teams modify shared pipelines, the system becomes inconsistent and fragile; debugging these divergent pipelines is a complex, time-consuming effort that increases production risk.
- Technical debt due to quick fixes and workarounds: Over time, this debt makes the system harder to maintain and improve, slowing down future development.
- Onboarding complexity and knowledge silos: New engineers take longer to become productive since they must grasp a unique, internally built system. Plus, if a key engineer who created the system leaves, the entire delivery process is at risk.
These challenges lead to a pivotal question for any leadership team:
“Are you in the business of building pipelines or shipping features?”
For most companies, the goal is to ship products, not to build and maintain internal tooling. This focus makes the alternative to DIY worth serious consideration.
Buy: Adopting a commercial IaC CI/CD platform
The purchase strategy involves licensing a managed platform for IaC CI/CD from a commercial vendor. Built to implement CI/CD best practices from the start, these platforms provide a cohesive solution for managing cloud infrastructure and standardizing software deployment strategies.
Why do teams consider buying?
The main reason for going with a third-party solution comes down to time efficiency in software development. A third-party solution saves time, enabling engineering teams to then dedicate their efforts to delivering business value.
Another key benefit is faster time-to-value. Commercial platforms provide pre-built integrations, templates, and guardrails that significantly speed up the creation of robust CI/CD pipelines. The vendor also handles all platform maintenance, security, and updates, saving your internal team from the undifferentiated task of managing tooling while also resulting in lower operational overhead.
Established platforms also come with built-in governance and best practices to enforce security policies, manage access, and ensure compliance. This helps to standardize operations as your organization grows and cuts the risk of misconfigurations.
Plus, when problems occur, a dedicated vendor support team and service-level agreements help slash downtime, along with the burden on your engineers.
What you give up when buying
Of course, this approach has trade-offs. Decision-makers often express concerns about flexibility, lack of customization, and vendor lock-in. A purchased solution might not fit every unique workflow, although leading platforms offer extensive configuration options. You’ll have to weigh the cost of adapting a few internal processes against the much higher cost of building and maintaining an entire system on your own.
Vendor lock-in is a valid concern, and relying on proprietary configurations or domain-specific languages (DSLs) can make it harder to switch solutions later on. But many modern platforms are built on open standards, which simplifies migration. And the “self-lock-in” from accumulated technical debt in a DIY system can often be a far greater risk.
DIY vs. third-party solutions: A comparison
A side-by-side view helps illustrate the strategic differences between building and purchasing your infrastructure automation for CI/CD pipelines.
| Criteria | DIY: Build it yourself | Buy: Commercial platform |
| Initial setup time | High (months to a year) | Low (days to weeks) |
| Upfront cost | Low (primarily engineering salaries) | High (license/subscription fees) |
| Ongoing maintenance | High and perpetual | Low (included in subscription) |
| Flexibility & control | Very high | Moderate to high (configurable) |
| Scalability | Complex to manage at scale | Designed for scale |
| Team focus | Divided between product and pipelines | Focused on core product delivery |
| Security & governance | Must be built and maintained in-house | Built-in features and guardrails |
| Vendor support | Relies on internal expertise | Dedicated support team |
| Hidden costs | Engineering time, opportunity cost, maintenance, feature delays | Potential vendor lock-in, workflow adaptation |
In brief: While a DIY solution has a lower upfront software cost, its total cost of ownership is often much higher. The hidden costs of an in-house solution can easily exceed the licensing fees of a commercial solution.
The choice ultimately comes down to your organization’s goals and needs.
When buying makes sense
Going with a third-party IaC CI/CD platform is often the better choice when:
- You need to scale quickly across multiple teams and environments.
- Your team has a high turnover and needs consistent, repeatable processes.
- You’re under pressure to release features faster without increasing operational risk.
- You want built-in security and compliance without having to allocate internal resources for maintenance.
When DIY is what you need
In-house solutions still have their place. Taking this route is the right fit if:
- You have a dedicated DevOps or platform engineering team with the bandwidth to build and maintain the solution.
- Your infrastructure has unique constraints or regulatory requirements that commercial tools can’t address.
- You’re in an early, fast-moving phase of product development and need full control to iterate rapidly.
A path forward with Quali
The decision to buy or build your IaC CI/CD solution requires a strategic evaluation. Still, regardless of the path you choose, a fundamental hurdle often remains a lack of insight into the infrastructure that your pipelines depend on.
The infrastructure automation platform Quali Torque solves the challenges of IaC CI/CD at scale by providing that crucial missing layer: visibility.
Even with commercial CI/CD tools, it is notoriously difficult to see the performance, usage, and cost of the underlying infrastructure on a per-pipeline basis. When a deployment fails, your teams are left asking: Did the infrastructure provision correctly? Who provisioned it? What error caused the failure? Answering these questions is often a painful, time-consuming process that slows down delivery and impacts reliability.
Quali Torque provides this essential context. It gives you:
- Complete visibility into your infrastructure via a unified control plane, enabling you to instantly identify issues
- Accelerated creation of infrastructure and environment code, empowering developers with self-service features while ensuring platform teams can enforce governance and manage costs effectively.
If you’re struggling with the DIY vs. third-party solution debate, a dedicated infrastructure automation platform can help. It adds the deep visibility and governance needed to scale a DIY approach while providing the infrastructure control that many commercial CI/CD tools lack.
Discover how Quali Torque can accelerate your IaC and CI/CD initiatives today.