Real-estate developers often talk about greenfield land like heaven on earth. No constraints or existing infrastructure, just one big empty canvas. But the reality in urban planning is that greenfield projects often take longer, cost around 40%-60% more, and demand huge amounts of new infrastructure before you can do anything meaningful.
It’s the same in software. Greenfield feels glamorous but often becomes a time sink. You spend months rebuilding something that already exists somewhere else because you want a fresh start. And then it rarely delivers value at the speed the business expects.
Of course, it can feel like a pleasure to start something from scratch, built exactly to your vision and architecture, without the need to sync with other teams. I’ve seen this firsthand – when I ask internally, “Should we build it or buy it?”, I often get the same answer.
A compromise that we often find is the plugins system i.e., let’s not build everything, but open our platform to allow anyone to integrate what they want, for the sake of time to market, time to delivery, and capability to customize.
Brownfield has the opposite reputation. People associate brownfield with legacy and compromise, and often for good reason. They think of tangled infrastructure and old code that nobody wants to own. But in the real world, brownfield regeneration often delivers far more long-term value and we can now accelerate the refactoring with AI, even if it needs to be understood and reviewed.
But why does it deliver more value? Because brownfield development forces discipline. You have to understand the environment and improve it without breaking the business. You also have to solve real problems that affect real people.
Greenfield lets you run away from this complexity, whereas brownfield forces you to master it.
Why the Greenfield vs Brownfield Divide is a Distraction
Let’s stop there for a second and catch our breath. The industry loves to debate greenfield versus brownfield like we are choosing sides in a football match. It’s pointless.
Modern companies run hybrid estates whether they like it or not.
They have cloud native services next to decade-old code. They have teams shipping new ideas while others keep critical systems alive. This is normal. The divide is not a strategic conversation. It is a distraction from the real problem, which is how to help teams of developers and Infrastructure / DevOps teams deliver value, no matter which part of the landscape they are working in.
The obsession with greenfield creates a kind of cultural superiority complex. Teams working on new builds often believe they are doing the real innovation, while everyone else is stuck in the past. In reality, of course, today’s greenfield projects are the brownfield of tomorrow, because nobody will ever think about how they integrate or evolve.
At the same time, brownfield pessimism slows companies down. People convince themselves that nothing can change because the existing estate is too tangled. Both are excuses.
For engineers, solutions architects, and developers, it is about creating a platform, a culture and a workflow where greenfield and brownfield stop being opposites. They become two ways of improving the same organisation.
Forget the Perfect Estate, Think About the Perfect Platform
The best Internal Developer Platforms don’t care whether a team is starting fresh or rebuilding something old. An IDP should give both groups the same clarity, safety, oversight and speed. It should allow a team to spin up a brand-new service without drowning in choices – but also allow another team to modernise a critical system without performing open-heart surgery on the entire company.
The refactoring of the traditional services can go step by step: the landing zone, the infrastructure stack, then the application layer.
When it comes to an Internal Developer Portal and/or Platform, many companies start with a self-service approach on top of VMware, as VMware is not made to address developers. Then comes the multi-cloud, Kubernetes world, and then the desire to have it in a DevOps / GitOps mindset. And finally comes the question of whether to build or buy! Most companies, according to top analyst firms, buy something to handle the greenfield and brownfield approaches. In reality, organisations need to stop wasting time debating approaches and start delivering outcomes.
This kind of platform has to make doing the right thing the easy thing. It must provide strong defaults, repeatable patterns and a clear path to production. Most importantly, a real platform stops companies from creating fantasy migration projects. On the one hand, it makes evolution normal, and it lets brownfield systems become greener over time through safe, iterative changes. It lets greenfield projects plug into the ecosystem instead of floating above it. When you get this right, the company moves like a living organism instead of a collection of isolated projects.
Any platform can support new projects, but a great platform can transform the old ones, too.
The winners will be the companies bold enough to stop romanticising fresh starts, take the decisions at the enterprise layer, and implement a dedicated team. The companies that adapt everything, not just the cool parts, that treat greenfield and brownfield as two sides of the same mission and that build software that survives contact with reality – will get stronger over time.