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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

The Google Next Keynote (where this was just announced) is emphasizing the multicloud/cloud agnostic/on-prem capabilities, which given the emphasis on cloud lock-in nowadays is not what I expected.

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It's Google's competitive advantage, and is still ultimately about lock-in.

Buy in to Kubernetes, buy in to Google Anthos, have the appearance of flexibility, but get used to GCP's tooling, quirks, documentation, etc, etc, and before long you're considering GC as the first option for all new development.

It makes perfect sense from where they are in the market.

Customers liking your service is not lock in.

...but customers being trained on “GCP's tooling, quirks, documentation” and not your competitors’ is. Also it extends beyond training, even cloud storage apis and tools are not drop-in compatible in clients and scripts.

I never understand the constant railing about "lock-in" here. My company currently runs on AWS and GCE, and maybe will be using a 3rd in the future. We can move between any provider as long as we update our tooling to work with cloud provider specifics. IE security group differences between AWS and GCE, etc.

They aren't doing anything to block us from leaving, and anyone here thinking there is going to be some kind of 100% unified API between every cloud provider is out of touch with reality, if that is what their expectation of "no vendor lock-in" is.

The real lock-in comes from using proprietary, cloud-specific services like Kinesis, Dynamo, or Spanner.

Sure, but there isn't a gun to your head. Use mysql or postgres on each provider if you're worried about that.

The current trope I see going around is that lock in centers (almost) 100% around identity management and access control, if you control that, you control your customer’s destiny. You can move a key value store anywhere on a whim.

Even just using IAM to grant permissions is going across those services is going to lock you in.

You're attempting to weaponise the notion that people are better at things they use vs things they don't use.

This can very much be a thing. Azure was originally built to look how many IT orgs deployed and managed their windows based infrastructure. It made it less scary to move into Azure, as opposed to AWS.

You can also see this in healthcare with Epic. They use absolutely bizarre names for everything to the point that it is hard for organizations using Epic to talk to organizations using other EHRs, or for employees to move between them. And since they have an absolute stranglehold on training and documentation, you basically have to go through them to be indoctrinated.

Folks have a real fear of change and learning is viewed as difficult and/or annoying. This can create considerable inertia that you can exploit.

Are you implying that leveraging that notion isn’t a business strategy?

You make it sound like lock-in is some unique strategy. That is the goal of every tech company. Enterprise, social or direct to consumer.

I think there's some nuance here that you may be discounting. There's a difference between "the appearance of flexibility" and actual flexibility. GCP's OSS friendliness and integration is legitimately a competitive advantage, but it also is being designed explicitly to avoid a need for lock-in. The cloud market is so enormous it's not necessary for Google to create explicit bias and technical stickiness in these core products.

On the other hand, where you do get potential stickiness are in the differentiated managed service offerings Google Cloud offers. These range broadly, from industry solutions & APIs to AI/ML services, to more more core data products (Spanner, Dataproc, BigQuery).

The second set of products/services don't really have any bearing on the OSS strategy and is unfair to position Google as being intentionally disingenuous in the marketing.

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