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Let's face it, fear of vendor lock-in is almost always bullshit. Everyone's locked into a vendor at some level or another. Want to move off of Oracle? It's wor
by manv1 4y ago
Let's face it, fear of vendor lock-in is almost always bullshit.
Everyone's locked into a vendor at some level or another. Want to move off of Oracle? It's work. Want to move off of servers and into VMs? It's work. Do you want to move off of some Java library like Spring? It's work. Even moving from apache to nginx is work (assuming you're not just serving static files).
Your technology choices always lock you in. You can minimize the cost of moving with architecture, but there's only so much you can do.
The key isn't avoiding vendor lock-in, it's understanding what the tradeoffs are for that lock-in and making sure it's a decision instead of a by-product.
It's like writing your stuff in NEW_TECH_LANGUAGE. Sure it might give you better performance, but now you have a bunch of deployment and maintenance headaches, and your people will cost more and be harder to find. And does it even work/scale in production/HA? How do you monitor it? What kind of weird runtime things are you going to get abused by?
- hotpotamus 4y agoI'd say there is a difference between technical path-dependence/tech debt, and a vendor who's actively able to take technical and legal steps to try and compel you to keep using their services. And obviously you should be getting something for the lock-in, otherwise you're setting money on fire for no reason. The fear is what happens once you are well and truly boxed in - somehow IBM still sells a bunch of mainframes, for instance. (Maybe they're truly amazing machines still; I know nothing about that world). I do spend a fair amount of time and effort trying to keep my company nimble; we try to use open source software and generic cloud primitives so we can move with some ease if need to. As you say, it is all work.
- manv1 4y agoI've never heard of AWS suing someone to keep using their services. I wouldn't be surprised if Oracle or any outsourcer did that...but that implies a breach of contract, not a transition after a contract is done. IBM sells mainframes because they're impossible to replace due to the way they're used. Those big printers that print financials statements apparently don't talk to anything else (funny, I was just talking about those the other day). It's about I/O and throughput with those things. You'd think someone would have come up with a replacement, but presumably the market is so small that nobody cares.
- nikau 4y agoEvery cloud vendor charges for egress but not ingress, the more data you onboard the more expensive it is to move off