> Even if you could move to an almost-identical service, there will be not-insignificant switching costs as you reconfigure everything with a different API and

> Even if you could move to an almost-identical service, there will be not-insignificant switching costs as you reconfigure everything with a different API and reimplement the glue code. That's true. I think we're essentially on the same page here. I guess I'm still using the old definition of lock in. Poor example: a proprietary Microsoft format that can only be understood by MS software. There is literally no alternative to using MS software if you want to access files created using this format. Does "high switching cost" == "lock in"? I think it is a grey area. I would not consider myself locked in to Lambda if I had made the decision to host my app there, although I do see there is a high switching cost. However, if I used RDS Postgres and Amazon decided to prevent me from creating database dumps to migrate to a self-hosted Postgres, then I would be very unhappy because that would be an arbitrary restriction with no purpose except to keep me on AWS. > To me, it seems like the cost of moving this to some other platform is quite a bit higher than the cost of moving something from, say, EC2. I agree completely with this. Let's say this was implemented on EC2 instances running Ubuntu, and configured with something like Salt or Puppet. The cost of moving to a Digital Ocean box would be negligible.