The issue with the “cost of switching” line of reasoning is that it’s not possible to offer the services that AWS, GCP, Azure do, without having a high cost of

The issue with the “cost of switching” line of reasoning is that it’s not possible to offer the services that AWS, GCP, Azure do, without having a high cost of switching. As a baseline, moving production workloads that run entirely on VPS or physical servers between datacenters is already a very high cost/high effort task. Anything you do to make the architecture more complicated is going to increase those costs. All AWS (and co) did was offer a platform for building complicated architectures. The market response was overwhelmingly positive, and entire new engineering disciplines sprung up around managing and building these new complicated architectures. Migrating them is typically rather difficult and high cost, but everybody knew this from the beginning, and this is what the customers want. The PaaS providers could maybe do something here or there to make it easier, but there’s nothing they can do to address the fundamental problem.