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Except that in the commerical software world, you can't stay independent with "purity". The costs of supporting multiple cloud providers is still a cost. K8S,

by rswail 7y ago

Except that in the commerical software world, you can't stay independent with "purity". The costs of supporting multiple cloud providers is still a cost. K8S, Docker, Pulumi, Packer are starting to reduce that interoperability gap, but it's still a friction. I've moved to .NET on Ubuntu for our current project (I'm an Engineer Manager/Architect, but the team is C#). It's been remarkably smooth and low friction. So it's a balance, the interests of a platform vendor are of course that you stay on their platform. But currently there's enough competition that it's still a buyers market. AWS is getting a bit too powerful, Azure is doing a good job of keeping MS shops in the MS world, but GCP is disappointing.

rectang 7y ago
In the abstract, what would best serve developer interests is if platforms are as compatible as possible, especially in their superficial details. That minimizes switching costs, both in terms of what it takes to port real software from one platform to another, and in terms of what a developer must learn to apply what they already know when working with a new platform. Taken to an ad absurdum conclusion, developers want all platform vendors to coordinate in order to minimize switching costs. Of course there are lots of good reasons such a level of coordination will never be realized. :) In the meantime, there will always be efforts to create adapters which generalize the interfaces of multiple platforms and put them behind a common wrapper interface. But while such interoperability efforts serve developer interests, they work against the interest of vendors in encouraging platform lock-in. The dynamic isn't pure in terms of real product offerings because vendors also understand that portability provides value to developers, and so some vendors will provide at least some portability in order to differentiate themselves. But I maintain that the fundamental interest structure is unchanging.

by rswail 7y ago

rectang 7y ago

In the abstract, what would best serve developer interests is if platforms are as compatible as possible, especially in their superficial details. That minimizes switching costs, both in terms of what it takes to port real software from one platform to another, and in terms of what a developer must learn to apply what they already know when working with a new platform. Taken to an ad absurdum conclusion, developers want all platform vendors to coordinate in order to minimize switching costs. Of course there are lots of good reasons such a level of coordination will never be realized. :) In the meantime, there will always be efforts to create adapters which generalize the interfaces of multiple platforms and put them behind a common wrapper interface. But while such interoperability efforts serve developer interests, they work against the interest of vendors in encouraging platform lock-in. The dynamic isn't pure in terms of real product offerings because vendors also understand that portability provides value to developers, and so some vendors will provide at least some portability in order to differentiate themselves. But I maintain that the fundamental interest structure is unchanging.