When To Develop Infrastructure Software In-House

• For some parts of the infrastructure, we did not manage to find satisfactory 3rd-party libraries.
• For example, there was no process-manager software that had the capabilities I deemed important - so it was decided to develop it in-house.
• Configuration libraries were plenty - but all had some annoying problems - they relied on too much extra libraries, they supported read but not write, some were too simplistic (treated everything as strings, did not support hierarchical data).
• Eventually, it was decided to go with XML (not my choice, but I did not strongly object), and go with a standard XML library (xerces). On Microsoft windows we went with Microsoft's library, since using xerces there proved to be a pain.

Originally written by guy keren