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I'm always amused at the vendor lock-in conversations. It's never about technology. It's about cost. If AWS ever priced themselves wildly above Azure or GCP or

I'm always amused at the vendor lock-in conversations. It's never about technology. It's about cost. If AWS ever priced themselves wildly above Azure or GCP or ___, shit would hit the fan. Outside of that, who cares if you're locked into one cloud or another? Features? Maybe if you're super picky about Power BI or SQL Server? It's never made any sense to me. S3 Lambdas look like a solid addition to AWS.

cm2187 6y ago
You should talk to someone at Parler.
- lolinder 6y ago
  Parler would not have been saved by being more mobile between clouds, no provider would have them. Only self hosting would have saved them, which is rarely what people are proposing when they talk about vendor lock-in.
freedomben 6y ago
I would have agreed with you a year or two ago, but times are changing. Vendor lock-in isn't just about cost anymore. You're also gambling on ideology that the provider you are locking in to won't decide to terminate your account and destroy your business because they disagree with your philosophy or politics.
- antihero 6y ago
  In Parler's case their platform was proudly used to organise illegal activity. Which is against ToS, not ideological. If someone hosted an MP3 piracy site or torrent tracker or carding forum on AWS, it would likely terminated too, regardless of whether Amazon are ideologically against piracy.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    I'm no fan of the content on Parler, but Twitter (who uses AWS) was used for far more organization of illegal activity than Parler was. Twitter wasn't targeted though. I don't think it was ideologically agreement with Twitter (although I'm sure there is much ideological agreement as the tech industry has become quite the echo chamber) as much as Twitter is just far too rich and powerful to be shut down. If you're a big fish with powerfu rich users like Twitter, then vendor lock-in isn't a risk. If you're a small, inconsequential platform that can be smashed like a fly on the window, then you really need to care about such things.
    - koboll 6y ago
      >I'm no fan of the content on Parler, but Twitter (who uses AWS) was used for far more organization of illegal activity than Parler was. Parler outright refused to delete posts calling for the mass killing of politicians, even when those posts were specifically pointed out to Parler by AWS. This is all detailed in court documents. AWS very patiently tried to prod Parler into following AWS's terms of service, but Parler refused. This is a very clear-cut matter and those suggesting otherwise are either trying to deceive or being misled.
      - edbob 6y ago
        What specific posts did Parler refuse to delete, and what is the evidence that they refused to delete them? IIRC, Parler was deleting posts that AWS complained about as they reviewed them, but had a large backlog, and AWS decided they were moving too slowly. I haven't seen any sourced claims that Parler refused to remove "posts calling for the mass killing of politicians", only unsupported allegations. If it really is so very clear-cut, do you have a very good source for those claims?
        freedomben 6y ago
        This matches my understanding as well. The CEO (at the time) was on a podcast and specifically said they were moderating/deleting the posts. AWS just wanted it to be done faster (in an automated fashion).
- ChicagoDave 6y ago
  If you’re not flaunting ToS, then making sure you have all your legal items taken care of (trademark, copyright, patents), you should be fine. If you’re building something that a cloud provider might adopt or build their own, well, isn’t that risky regardless of the cloud provider element? I know some companies avoid one provider or the other out of competitive concerns. That seems easily managed with contractual obligations. Twitter has enabled some borderline illegal behavior, but the account holder has been the one at risk. I don’t think Twitter systematically allows illegal behavior like parler did.
  - skynet-9000 6y ago
    > If you’re not flaunting ToS,... you should be fine. https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ https://aws.amazon.com/aup/: You may not use, or encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to use, the Services.. for any.. offensive use, or to transmit, store, display, distribute or otherwise make available content that is.. offensive. What does offensive mean? Who defines it?
  - skynet-9000 6y ago
    > Twitter systematically allows illegal behavior like parler did. Does this sound libelous to you, and do you have evidence supporting this? Even AWS's response didn't allege Parler "systematically allowed illegal behavior".
    - ChicagoDave 6y ago
      You forgot the "I don't think" part of that sentence.
- deanCommie 6y ago
  First they came for the Nazis, and I didn't say anything because I wasn't a Nazi. All the slippery slope arguments really need at least one questionable cloud de-platforming before they will hold any significance...
ThinkBeat 6y ago
It is amusing that for years the common wisdom and fad was to write your database layer so that it could be independent of the database engine. The idea was to avoid vendor lock and make it "easy" to change the database engine. A project was on, perhaps 2 years ago, still followed this pattern, but it ended up also adopting somewhere between 10 - 15 AWS services and we never discussed an abstraction layer on top of it. There are one or two efforts now to create an independent layer on top of cloud services. I have a hard time understanding how that will work outside of basic services.
- sangnoir 6y ago
  Kubernetes is the independent layer on top of cloud services - unsurprisingly it is championed by Google who are #3 in the cloud business, so they have a vested interest in people not being vendor locked to AWS. K8s seems to be doing well.
- monstersinF 6y ago
  > There are one or two efforts now to create an independent layer on top of cloud services. I have seen this fail in dozens of ways
Zelphyr 6y ago
I see the avoidance of vendor lock-in as a way to prevent Amazon from gaining too much power compared to their competition (they already do, but you see my point, hopefully) I’m designing a system right now and I’m specifically not allowing it to become too ingrained into the AWS ecosystem so that I can easy move it to GCP, Azure, or elsewhere (would that Digital Ocean offered better support) if/when Amazon gets too big and starts to take advantage of their size. That will happen. It’s only a matter of time.
devwastaken 6y ago
If you base your product on locked in services you are at the mercy of those services. Once you scale you will no longer afford to use AWS and have to colocate your own hardware, along with entirely reimplementing your stack to use open source software. Not every startup is a billion "forever" funded project like Imgur or Twitter that can throw money in a hole and not care. Lots of smaller companies are coming to terms with having to shun away cloud services and rely on "the old ways", because it's the only affordable and scalable option. AWS is for privledged companies playing with silicon valley monopoly money based on made up "evaluations", most people don't have that benefit.
- nemothekid 6y ago
  >Once you scale you will no longer afford to use AWS and have to colocate your own hardware, along with entirely reimplementing your stack to use open source software. More companies are moving to the cloud from managed colo than the inverse. For example, companies like Uber and Adobe has been moving from their own datacenters to AWS. Even dinosaurs like Disney have moved to the cloud. Anyone who saves a significant amount of money running their own DCs vs uses the cloud either has significant security requirements or is the in the business of selling infrastructure (ex. Dropbox)
  - libria 6y ago
    And even for those "dinosaurs" that are persnickety about control, Outposts allows them to house the rack onsite while still being managed by the AWS console. On on-premise cloud, if you will.
- deanCommie 6y ago
  I see it slightly differently. For most of the history of our industry, companies were penny-wise but pound-foolish. And I don't mean non technical leadership here, I include the developers themselves. (I'll spend 2 weeks to automate a tasks that takes 10 minutes to do manually once a week) Everyone is waking up to the "total cost" of software development. Market forces are forcing people to realize that developer time is the most valuable commodity there is. Companies don't go to the cloud because they have silicon valley money to burn. They go to the cloud because every minute of their developer time that is not spent on development operations and maintainance of code that a cloud provider offers instead, is a minute they can spend on the core UNIQUE business proposition of the company. You can bemoan the skills lost in our industry, but that always happened at every layer of abstraction in every technical industry.

cm2187 6y ago

You should talk to someone at Parler.

lolinder 6y ago
Parler would not have been saved by being more mobile between clouds, no provider would have them. Only self hosting would have saved them, which is rarely what people are proposing when they talk about vendor lock-in.

freedomben 6y ago

I would have agreed with you a year or two ago, but times are changing. Vendor lock-in isn't just about cost anymore. You're also gambling on ideology that the provider you are locking in to won't decide to terminate your account and destroy your business because they disagree with your philosophy or politics.

antihero 6y ago
In Parler's case their platform was proudly used to organise illegal activity. Which is against ToS, not ideological. If someone hosted an MP3 piracy site or torrent tracker or carding forum on AWS, it would likely terminated too, regardless of whether Amazon are ideologically against piracy.
- freedomben 6y ago
  I'm no fan of the content on Parler, but Twitter (who uses AWS) was used for far more organization of illegal activity than Parler was. Twitter wasn't targeted though. I don't think it was ideologically agreement with Twitter (although I'm sure there is much ideological agreement as the tech industry has become quite the echo chamber) as much as Twitter is just far too rich and powerful to be shut down. If you're a big fish with powerfu rich users like Twitter, then vendor lock-in isn't a risk. If you're a small, inconsequential platform that can be smashed like a fly on the window, then you really need to care about such things.
  - koboll 6y ago
    >I'm no fan of the content on Parler, but Twitter (who uses AWS) was used for far more organization of illegal activity than Parler was. Parler outright refused to delete posts calling for the mass killing of politicians, even when those posts were specifically pointed out to Parler by AWS. This is all detailed in court documents. AWS very patiently tried to prod Parler into following AWS's terms of service, but Parler refused. This is a very clear-cut matter and those suggesting otherwise are either trying to deceive or being misled.
    - edbob 6y ago
      What specific posts did Parler refuse to delete, and what is the evidence that they refused to delete them? IIRC, Parler was deleting posts that AWS complained about as they reviewed them, but had a large backlog, and AWS decided they were moving too slowly. I haven't seen any sourced claims that Parler refused to remove "posts calling for the mass killing of politicians", only unsupported allegations. If it really is so very clear-cut, do you have a very good source for those claims?
      - freedomben 6y ago
        This matches my understanding as well. The CEO (at the time) was on a podcast and specifically said they were moderating/deleting the posts. AWS just wanted it to be done faster (in an automated fashion).
ChicagoDave 6y ago
If you’re not flaunting ToS, then making sure you have all your legal items taken care of (trademark, copyright, patents), you should be fine. If you’re building something that a cloud provider might adopt or build their own, well, isn’t that risky regardless of the cloud provider element? I know some companies avoid one provider or the other out of competitive concerns. That seems easily managed with contractual obligations. Twitter has enabled some borderline illegal behavior, but the account holder has been the one at risk. I don’t think Twitter systematically allows illegal behavior like parler did.
- skynet-9000 6y ago
  > If you’re not flaunting ToS,... you should be fine. https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ https://aws.amazon.com/aup/: You may not use, or encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to use, the Services.. for any.. offensive use, or to transmit, store, display, distribute or otherwise make available content that is.. offensive. What does offensive mean? Who defines it?
- skynet-9000 6y ago
  > Twitter systematically allows illegal behavior like parler did. Does this sound libelous to you, and do you have evidence supporting this? Even AWS's response didn't allege Parler "systematically allowed illegal behavior".
  - ChicagoDave 6y ago
    You forgot the "I don't think" part of that sentence.
deanCommie 6y ago
First they came for the Nazis, and I didn't say anything because I wasn't a Nazi. All the slippery slope arguments really need at least one questionable cloud de-platforming before they will hold any significance...

ThinkBeat 6y ago

It is amusing that for years the common wisdom and fad was to write your database layer so that it could be independent of the database engine. The idea was to avoid vendor lock and make it "easy" to change the database engine. A project was on, perhaps 2 years ago, still followed this pattern, but it ended up also adopting somewhere between 10 - 15 AWS services and we never discussed an abstraction layer on top of it. There are one or two efforts now to create an independent layer on top of cloud services. I have a hard time understanding how that will work outside of basic services.

sangnoir 6y ago
Kubernetes is the independent layer on top of cloud services - unsurprisingly it is championed by Google who are #3 in the cloud business, so they have a vested interest in people not being vendor locked to AWS. K8s seems to be doing well.
monstersinF 6y ago
> There are one or two efforts now to create an independent layer on top of cloud services. I have seen this fail in dozens of ways

Zelphyr 6y ago

I see the avoidance of vendor lock-in as a way to prevent Amazon from gaining too much power compared to their competition (they already do, but you see my point, hopefully) I’m designing a system right now and I’m specifically not allowing it to become too ingrained into the AWS ecosystem so that I can easy move it to GCP, Azure, or elsewhere (would that Digital Ocean offered better support) if/when Amazon gets too big and starts to take advantage of their size. That will happen. It’s only a matter of time.

devwastaken 6y ago

If you base your product on locked in services you are at the mercy of those services. Once you scale you will no longer afford to use AWS and have to colocate your own hardware, along with entirely reimplementing your stack to use open source software. Not every startup is a billion "forever" funded project like Imgur or Twitter that can throw money in a hole and not care. Lots of smaller companies are coming to terms with having to shun away cloud services and rely on "the old ways", because it's the only affordable and scalable option. AWS is for privledged companies playing with silicon valley monopoly money based on made up "evaluations", most people don't have that benefit.

nemothekid 6y ago
>Once you scale you will no longer afford to use AWS and have to colocate your own hardware, along with entirely reimplementing your stack to use open source software. More companies are moving to the cloud from managed colo than the inverse. For example, companies like Uber and Adobe has been moving from their own datacenters to AWS. Even dinosaurs like Disney have moved to the cloud. Anyone who saves a significant amount of money running their own DCs vs uses the cloud either has significant security requirements or is the in the business of selling infrastructure (ex. Dropbox)
- libria 6y ago
  And even for those "dinosaurs" that are persnickety about control, Outposts allows them to house the rack onsite while still being managed by the AWS console. On on-premise cloud, if you will.
deanCommie 6y ago
I see it slightly differently. For most of the history of our industry, companies were penny-wise but pound-foolish. And I don't mean non technical leadership here, I include the developers themselves. (I'll spend 2 weeks to automate a tasks that takes 10 minutes to do manually once a week) Everyone is waking up to the "total cost" of software development. Market forces are forcing people to realize that developer time is the most valuable commodity there is. Companies don't go to the cloud because they have silicon valley money to burn. They go to the cloud because every minute of their developer time that is not spent on development operations and maintainance of code that a cloud provider offers instead, is a minute they can spend on the core UNIQUE business proposition of the company. You can bemoan the skills lost in our industry, but that always happened at every layer of abstraction in every technical industry.