Buy or build? Cloud or on-prem? Packaged analytics software of custom Python? These are false choices. No business can afford to think of these choices in a binary way. The challenges in terms of business opportunities, talent constraints, compute trade-offs and data availability are highly situational, and each company needs to architect its stack for its needs. Ken Sanford shares his deep experience, as well as some provocative and effective frameworks for making the best choices for your firm, informed by your needs, not by sales pitches and feverish hype.