Tom Phelan walks through some thoughts on whether to build versus buy when using big data platforms:
This means you absolutely must sweat the details up front. Big Data project failures are more often than not predicated by the statement: “We will do this bit now, and figure the rest out later”. But you need to begin with the end in mind.
You need to know the performance that you’ll be able to deliver and what your requirements are. You need to know how to integrate with your corporate Active Directory, and LDAP, and Kerberos services. You need to know your network topology and security requirements as well as the required user roles and responsibilities breakdown. You need to know how you’ll handle high availability, QoS, and multi-tenancy. You need to know how you’ll manage upgrades to the latest versions of your Hadoop distribution or other big data tools, and how you’ll respond to requests for new big data frameworks and new data science tools. If not, you’re just asking for trouble.
The motif in his post is building your own car, which makes sense as an extended metaphor.