In celebration of our Day of Independence, Gathering Clouds thought we would explore what it takes to gain vendor freedom in the cloud context.
Vendor lock-in is a much discussed issue in the cloud. But on some level, the choices your company makes can determine the degree of lock-in you either exist in or feel on a day-to-day basis.
There’s a strategic imperative around be agile in your cloud vendor relationships. Lock-in can be detrimental, especially when you reach the point that you do need to transition out of a certain cloud, due to scale or other requirements.
Perhaps your company has reached the scale where buying hardware and depreciating the costs are a smarter decision compared to continuing to rent infrastructure through AWS. What you buy might not work well with AWS, and the skills your internal team has developed might not (probably won’t) translate.
There are features in AWS that act as points of lock-in and it’s hard to get around these. They are amazing tools, but they don’t have easily paralleled equivalents like Elastic beanstalk, Elastic Map Reduce, S3, and so many more. Transitioning out of these services is difficult, especially when AWS makes it so easy to access all of them. Outside of AWS, there are 3 competing privatized cloud: Openstack, Cloud Stack and VMware. When it comes to MSPs, VMware is the lion’s share of the market.