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I want to know who has actually accepted a cloud vendor's lockin...and then regretted it, had to change, and wished they'd done it up front. I have yet to meet

I want to know who has actually accepted a cloud vendor's lockin...and then regretted it, had to change, and wished they'd done it up front. I have yet to meet them.

scarface74 7y ago
Even companies that have decided to start on a cloud vendor and then found product market fit, grew their in house competencies, and then decided to build out their own data centers didn’t express “regret” for starting on the cloud provider. At that point they were well capitalized enough to move off. Even almighty Amazon took a decade to move off of Oracle. Concentrating on avoiding being tied to Oracle early on instead of building a business would have been silly. Trying to avoid “vendor lock in” when you’re still trying to grow your business, when your focus should be trying to acquire customers, and raise revenue and profit is the ultimate premature optimization.
- lostcolony 7y ago
  That's what I mean. I recognize it can be an issue later on, and then you deal with it...I've yet to see the case where it was worth worrying about up front, even in hindsight. I also haven't seen the reverse, the multi-cloud people who later on drop a cloud provider because of some reason, going "omg, thank goodness we didn't let ourselves be locked in to one, this saved so much time/money/effort".
- chii 7y ago
  > Trying to avoid “vendor lock in” when you’re still trying to grow your business it depends on your core business. Don't be "vendor locked-in" for any core business competencies. But do get "vendor locked-in" for non-core competencies. If you're core competency is merely just white-labelling another business's offering, then obviously it's a bad practise. But for things that are easily commoditized - like CRM and payroll, why not be "vendor locked-in", and save the cost of development, and enjoy the lower scaling cost?
  - wolco 7y ago
    Why not go open source increase development cost and enjoy the lowest scaling cost. If the price per seat is 5.00 dollar per person and next month it could be 5000 because they require you to pay surge pricing getting locked on could kill your business quickly.
    - paulryanrogers 7y ago
      By surge do you mean due to increase in ones own usage or demand for provider's service? Do any cloud providers have surge pricing? (I've not read to many SLAs myself.)
      - scarface74 7y ago
        I’ve never heard of “surge pricing” or anything similar. Sure there is spot pricing where you can tell AWS you are willing to pay up to $x for compute and based on demand the cost of compute will be more. But you use that to save money for cases where you are running something that can benefit from more compute but only worth it at a certain price. You would never pay more than the published price. AWS has never raised the price for a service since it existed.
        nivertech 7y ago
        not completely true, sometimes they raise prices by launching a next-gen version of the service with higher pricing, i.e. ELB vs ALB.
        jessaustin 7y ago
        ELB is still available and still does the job.
        nivertech 7y ago
        AWS never discontinued services, they just removing them from the marketing website and/or making them harder to find. I can still launch old instance types which are no longer listed. Same with SimpleDB still works.
streetcat1 7y ago
Vendor lock-in shows up when you want to cut costs. For example, during a recession. It basically a fixed cost imposed by the cloud providers. I.e. when the economy contract, and yet AWS/Azure profits are growing, this is the pain of vendor locking.
- scarface74 7y ago
  And employee’s salary is not a fixed cost? Or are you going to ask your employees to do double duty because “we are family and we are in this together”? How many companies that were on such thin margins between surviving and going out of business that cutting infrastructure spending by 10 or 20% was going to make a difference in them being able to survive?
  - streetcat1 7y ago
    Yes, they are. But this is outside the point. Which is, vendor locking did not show itself, because the economy was good.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Companies have been “locked-in” to vendors since IBM in the 50s. There are still plenty of successful companies that have been dependent on IBM for decades and weathered plenty of recessions. That’s not to mention all of the companies in the modern era that are completely “locked in” to the Microsoft ecosystem and spend literally millions on Windows, Sql Server, Active Directory, Office 365, etc. and have also weathered recessions. Any large company depends on literally dozens of vendors that they have tied their business process into where it would be a major pain to switch. I know in the health care industry, a lot of health systems are so tightly tied into their EMR/EHR, leaving a something like AWS would be a breeze.
      - paulryanrogers 7y ago
        Could it be large companies have war chests to draw on? Smaller companies often run leaner. Except maybe for big airlines that spent their surpluses on stock buybacks and executive pay increases.
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
Every now and then we have articles about somebody making some seemingly insignificant configuration mistake that ends up costing them 10s of thousands of dollars over a little bit of time. There was something in the last month where somebody closed their company because such a mistake took them through many months worth of bootstrapping budget. I don't know if that counts as regretting the lock-in, but I guess they regretted something about their cloud provider.
- lostcolony 7y ago
  No, not understanding your vendor's pricing is a very separate issue. I'd imagine had they gone multi-cloud they'd regret it even more.

I want to know who has actually accepted a cloud vendor's lockin...and then regretted it, had to change, and wished they'd done it up front. I have yet to meet them.

scarface74 7y ago

Even companies that have decided to start on a cloud vendor and then found product market fit, grew their in house competencies, and then decided to build out their own data centers didn’t express “regret” for starting on the cloud provider. At that point they were well capitalized enough to move off. Even almighty Amazon took a decade to move off of Oracle. Concentrating on avoiding being tied to Oracle early on instead of building a business would have been silly. Trying to avoid “vendor lock in” when you’re still trying to grow your business, when your focus should be trying to acquire customers, and raise revenue and profit is the ultimate premature optimization.

lostcolony 7y ago
That's what I mean. I recognize it can be an issue later on, and then you deal with it...I've yet to see the case where it was worth worrying about up front, even in hindsight. I also haven't seen the reverse, the multi-cloud people who later on drop a cloud provider because of some reason, going "omg, thank goodness we didn't let ourselves be locked in to one, this saved so much time/money/effort".
chii 7y ago
> Trying to avoid “vendor lock in” when you’re still trying to grow your business it depends on your core business. Don't be "vendor locked-in" for any core business competencies. But do get "vendor locked-in" for non-core competencies. If you're core competency is merely just white-labelling another business's offering, then obviously it's a bad practise. But for things that are easily commoditized - like CRM and payroll, why not be "vendor locked-in", and save the cost of development, and enjoy the lower scaling cost?
- wolco 7y ago
  Why not go open source increase development cost and enjoy the lowest scaling cost. If the price per seat is 5.00 dollar per person and next month it could be 5000 because they require you to pay surge pricing getting locked on could kill your business quickly.
  - paulryanrogers 7y ago
    By surge do you mean due to increase in ones own usage or demand for provider's service? Do any cloud providers have surge pricing? (I've not read to many SLAs myself.)
    - scarface74 7y ago
      I’ve never heard of “surge pricing” or anything similar. Sure there is spot pricing where you can tell AWS you are willing to pay up to $x for compute and based on demand the cost of compute will be more. But you use that to save money for cases where you are running something that can benefit from more compute but only worth it at a certain price. You would never pay more than the published price. AWS has never raised the price for a service since it existed.
      - nivertech 7y ago
        not completely true, sometimes they raise prices by launching a next-gen version of the service with higher pricing, i.e. ELB vs ALB.
        jessaustin 7y ago
        ELB is still available and still does the job.
        nivertech 7y ago
        AWS never discontinued services, they just removing them from the marketing website and/or making them harder to find. I can still launch old instance types which are no longer listed. Same with SimpleDB still works.

streetcat1 7y ago

Vendor lock-in shows up when you want to cut costs. For example, during a recession. It basically a fixed cost imposed by the cloud providers. I.e. when the economy contract, and yet AWS/Azure profits are growing, this is the pain of vendor locking.

scarface74 7y ago
And employee’s salary is not a fixed cost? Or are you going to ask your employees to do double duty because “we are family and we are in this together”? How many companies that were on such thin margins between surviving and going out of business that cutting infrastructure spending by 10 or 20% was going to make a difference in them being able to survive?
- streetcat1 7y ago
  Yes, they are. But this is outside the point. Which is, vendor locking did not show itself, because the economy was good.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Companies have been “locked-in” to vendors since IBM in the 50s. There are still plenty of successful companies that have been dependent on IBM for decades and weathered plenty of recessions. That’s not to mention all of the companies in the modern era that are completely “locked in” to the Microsoft ecosystem and spend literally millions on Windows, Sql Server, Active Directory, Office 365, etc. and have also weathered recessions. Any large company depends on literally dozens of vendors that they have tied their business process into where it would be a major pain to switch. I know in the health care industry, a lot of health systems are so tightly tied into their EMR/EHR, leaving a something like AWS would be a breeze.
    - paulryanrogers 7y ago
      Could it be large companies have war chests to draw on? Smaller companies often run leaner. Except maybe for big airlines that spent their surpluses on stock buybacks and executive pay increases.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

Every now and then we have articles about somebody making some seemingly insignificant configuration mistake that ends up costing them 10s of thousands of dollars over a little bit of time. There was something in the last month where somebody closed their company because such a mistake took them through many months worth of bootstrapping budget. I don't know if that counts as regretting the lock-in, but I guess they regretted something about their cloud provider.

lostcolony 7y ago
No, not understanding your vendor's pricing is a very separate issue. I'd imagine had they gone multi-cloud they'd regret it even more.