Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not saying lock in doesn't exist. But I can't really envision how you would design a full cloud offering without vendor lock in of some sort? Beyond offering all services as open source so you can run them on your own data-center.

I'm being serious, how do you design an API and a set of distributed intercommunicating systems in a way that doesn't couple you with their specific APIs, communication channels and semantics?

I don't think it's possible.

I can see suggesting using open source solutions instead that you run on your own, but that still couples you to those specific solutions, except they're open source so in theory you could fork it and have more control over them. I get that. But this is a different argument I feel. Since the cost of maintaining these open source products on your own is high, and the cost of switching to a different open source solution is as much as moving to another cloud provider.

I think the only form of lock in right now that might seem designed by the business, and not an artifact of the tech itself, is the high price of exporting your data out.

The fact that millions of people were able to read this message almost instantly after it was written, without knowing anything about the device it was written or the location it is coming from, shows it is possible to decouple specifics and adhere to open standards for all players involved. There is just no incentive to do that for what AWS provides. It is a cash cow, exactly because of how useful it is if you have this set of problems they solve.

I think AWS is basically a large SaaS that sells you solutions to problems you have at scale. I don't think the lock in is only in the effort to export data, the lock in is also that a company will use the same building blocks for every new project or new feature on existing projects because their current staff is already trained and new hires don't know how to do it without those services either.

So just like in the 90's nobody got fired for buying IBM, today nobody gets fired for using AWS, even though they don't have problems at the scale AWS is great at.

Lock-in is unavoidable with the cloud and cloud vendors - but I think the issue here is the degree of lock-in and the way people get there. This sort of stuff by AWS is very clearly seen as luring people in with OSS, industry standard, vendor-neutral technologies and then pulling a fast one on them. Whether or not that's the _actual_ goal I can't say, but I can see how it looks that way.

I'm not saying lock in doesn't exist. But I can't really envision how you would design a full cloud offering without vendor lock in of some sort?

I believe this is what Rackspace was attempting a while ago -- leveraging OpenStack to provide cloud services, so you'd be free from lockin in the sense that you could move to some other OpenStack compatible provider.

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