Amazon is probably in a unique position in that providing data and database services is a core competency, and so vertical integration off of Oracle makes a lot of sense even separate from the cost leverage question.
It's only half a million dollars to egress 10 PB from S3. You'll be fine.
It's a total boogeyman and I've never heard anyone care about it except on HN, where it comes up constantly.
When one of our upstream ISPs had an outage and prevented some of customers from being able to reach us people were mad at us even after the explanation. AWS is enough of a household name that you can say sorry "AWS is down right now" and people will sympathize.
And perhaps more importantly to these companies, lock-in is more than worth it if it means benefiting from some real revenue or cost optimizations. Paying $3 to "unlock" from a platform is more than worth it if said platform gave me $5 of benefit.
Like the commentator you responded to said. There are many fools in business.
I'm not talking about rebuilding everything from scratch, but making an active effort to do self introspection and ask yourself "we built this app 3 years ago with certain requirements in mind and chose stack X to host it, but a lot has changed in the past 3 years, both in our requirements and in the technology landscape. Should we still be using stack X or does something else fit our needs better?" is unequivocally a good practice.
- Object storage is basically identical, often even down to common API wrappers
- VMs are VMs
- Kubernetes is Kubernetes. Containers are containers.
- EMR is Dataproc is whatever Azure has
- BigQuery is Redshift is whatever Azure provides. It's big SQL. Whatever.
Like, I'm not saying there isn't a cost, or it's pain-free... but you're not re-engineering everything when you migrate. You're finding fiddly difference between platforms, and if you're an enterprise, your new cloud provider would LOVE to help you with that migration.
That’s not even including the training involved. At the same time, your competitors are actually trying to create products that meet their customers needs while your resources are tied up in migrations.
Ask the same in your own infrastructure. They'll give even worse estimate.
The thing with the cloud, is that it's public, they all follow the same stuff and their goal is for you to migrate to them. They got an hundred similar situation as yours.
> At the same time, your competitors are actually trying to create products that meet their customers needs while your resources are tied up in migrations.
How is that different from your own infrastructure? If you have to migrate, you have to migrate... whatever is the source and whatever is the destination, migration is migration.
Platform lock in is a risk. The reward is faster time to market, thus making more money earlier, thus having more means to ameliorate your risks.
Some companies are better than others. One place I worked had a decent OpenStack implementation in their own data centers, and it greased the wheels a little bit (though it was not without its own issues). And of course smaller companies are likely more agile and able to move faster. But for the most part, these big companies see some very real benefits in speed by embracing public clouds.
I always wondered why big enterprise customers are not concerned about lock in. Maybe they cut multi year deals with the big cloud providers?
Do you know how many third party services and offerings that the typical F500 depend on? More than 80% have a huge “lock in” to Microsoft.
How does avoiding “lock in” add business value either by reducing cost or increasing revenue.
Out of all the business risks that a company has, avoiding lock-in is the least of them.
