We’re not buying into IBM mainframes anymore and although there are still customers tied to Oracle databases, vendor lock-in just isn’t that big of a deal anymore.
cloud vendor lock-in fears are overblown. pricing and features will always be competitive between the big vendors. I suspect people waste a lot of time/money trying to be cloud agnostic.
Real vendor lock-in is when you have decades of code written against an Oracle DB and you're getting charged outrageous Oracle rates and it would also cost a fortune migrate.
Precisely - vendor lock-in generally happens at the data level. For example, AWS finally turned off their last Oracle DB server only a year or two ago.
Vendor lock-in is most definitely a huge thing. And being on the side that wants to avoid it and build portable solutions is never a winning argument. You're always the guy who's setting the perfect up as the enemy of the "works now."
I seriously doubt that IBM can execute on this plan based on my limited experience with them. But if they could, it would be a winning move.
There is a certain amount of arrogance to always being afraid of vendor lock-in. Most companies don’t survive, even the best ones might be just around for 20-25 years. The big worry should be on building a business that won’t immediately die.
And even with Oracle (probably the primo example of lock-in) it’s not like there aren’t firms who’s sole speciality is pumping data out of the Oracle DB and transforming it magically into T-SQL. It’s never the end of the world with vendor lock-in.
NOTE: now vendor lock-out does scare me like no other ironically
'Vendor Lock in' was also a problem. When it came time to renew leases/licenses, IBM could say whatever. There was no recourse but to pay. Funny/sad that we believed Oracle when they said they were the solution to 'Vendor Lock in'. The billion+ dollar grift was thick.
I think that more often than not the effort to avoid vendor lock-in isn't worth it, especially when it is very common for your "generic" wrapper around cloud services to over time bake in assumptions specific to the one platform you ever run it on and be, in effect, locked in anyway.
I'd cloud vendor lock-in a serious concern for most businesses? It always feels like a requirement that originates from the technical side rather than the business side. But it never feels like it's that important actually.
Vendor lock-in is an unavoidable cost of doing business. Even if you build literally everything yourself, which you shouldn't, you still have resources, processes, apis, automation, expertise amassed around a specific set of operating constraints.
Not only that, but if you invest significantly in any single technology, migrating to another technology is always going to be an extreme effort. Having led migrations from datacenters to AWS, AWS to Digital Ocean, RabbitMQ to NSQ to SNS+SQS, etc., I can say at this point that I do not believe in vendor lock-in as a legitimate reason to disqualify any particular solution.
I agree that vendor lock-in is expensive. It's not as expensive as the investment companies make in keeping their tech cloud-agnostic, investments that never seem to pay off. Either the day never comes, or when it does, switching costs are still surprisingly high.
That's the same, old vendor lock-in approach. It has happened with the servers, databases, network equipment etc. now it happens with cloud -- nothing unexpected, prepare to see more of these when cloud market stabilizes and clear leaders emerge. That's why I always prefer open solutions, that can be moved/migrated/replaced easily and advise others to do the same.
Aggressively avoiding lock-in is something I've never quite understood. Unless your provider of choice is also your competitor (like Spotify with Amazon) it shouldn't really be a problem. I'm not saying I'm a die hard cloud fan in all aspects but if you're going with it you may as well use it. Typically trying to avoid vendor lockin really ends up more expensive in the long run, you start avoiding the cheaper services (lambda for background job processing) for what may never really be a problem.
The one place I can see avoiding vendor lock-in as really useful is it often makes running things locally much easier. You're kind of screwed if you want to properly run something locally that uses SQS, DynamoDB, and Lambda. But that said, I think this is often better thought of as "keep my system simple" rather than "avoid vendor lock-in" as it focuses on the valuable side rather than the theoretical side.
Vendor lock in is a bad example, it's not like you're going to move your infrastructure from AWS to Google every 6months. And if you do you will have many more complicated problems than vendor lock in.
https://www.cloudtp.com/doppler/is-vendor-lock-in-keeping-yo...
We’re not buying into IBM mainframes anymore and although there are still customers tied to Oracle databases, vendor lock-in just isn’t that big of a deal anymore.
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