80legs CEO Shion Deysarkar wrote a piece for the Structure blog over the weekend detailing why his company built a proprietary data infrastructure from scratch, and why others should consider following suit. If you read the post’s comments, you’ll notice quickly that not everyone agrees with this approach, and you can count me among them. If COTS won’t work, open source tools have to be the alternative. As the commentors point out, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to get high-performance capabilities, and you can actually find talent to work on your infrastructure, if need be. Yes, there’s something to be said about having your own secret sauce, but why not develop that atop an open source foundation?