Hacker News Reader

Is it though? I think the possibility to move to another solution is the way to deal with vendor lock in. Simple example, one of my clients wanted to move to AWS but they were super afraid of lock in. We had to create exit strategy for them with cost analysis and now they are happily using AWS services knowing they can move to GCP or something else for a certain amount of money.

View on HN

Glad to hear things worked out for your client. The key thing is, YOU had to create an exit strategy just for your client.

If the specifications for the serverless platform were "open" then the client could move their stack to different vendor with insignificant planning/risk.

An analogy would be vendors somehow changing machine virtualization such that your code was required to be very hypervisor-aware to function, and porting from vmware to xen imposed significant cost and risk.

I am not sure how much of this is not already mitigated with https://serverless.com. I have never used Lambda without it. For me serverless.com is the solution to avoid vendor lock in. However, Lambda is a tiny fraction of the entire stack we are talking about here. S3 + EMR + ALB + EC2 are all there and they are much more difficult to dodge the vendor lock in bullet with. One particularly sticky vendor lock in for S3 is pricing and reliability. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to beat that. My clients just discovered this, it would be significantly more expensive to move from S3 to HDFS or any other storage solution. This has nothing to do with how open the platform is, yet it is a much more serious lock in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com