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by moduspol 2687 days ago
> Serverless applications' reliance on other proprietary services like Cognito, DynamoDB etc is another thing however...

I feel like even this lock-in is overstated. Those other services are billed based on usage and are completely separate from each other. Your migration path away would be one service at a time.

That's in no way comparable to traditional lock-in, which is like a decades-old Oracle database with high licensing fees paid annually and depended upon by dozens of complex business processes interacting directly and indirectly with each other. You don't really have a migration path in that case because there's not enough time / resources to decouple everything and migrate to something else, so you're stuck.

And that doesn't touch on the reality that if you're not relying on AWS for Lambda, DynamoDB, Kinesis, etc., then you're maintaining something yourself, which itself is not free from lock-in. Building a system that heavily utilizes Cassandra or Kafka may not have an annual licensing cost, but absolutely imposes a cost in terms of maintenance, team expertise, and (of course) makes moving away from them look not much different than moving from DynamoDB or Kinesis.