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by geezerjay 2642 days ago
> They would love some lock-in but it is not at the forefront of their minds when creating a service.

I really find that assertion hard to believe. AWS is notoriously expensive and oddly enough its added value comes in the form of proprietary technologies which require non-transferable tech skills. The lock-in overload goes to the extreme of leading technicians to specialize exclusively in AWS services which leads to the infamous title of AWS engineer. This doesn't happen by chance, but by design. It's like a very expensive mousetrap designed to help victims get in but being practically very hard if not impossible to get out.
2 comments
scarface74 2642 days ago
The most expensive parts of AWS for us are:

RDS - hosted non proprietary databases.

EC2 - Standard VM hosting

Redshift - a proprietary OLAP database that uses standard Postgres drivers

S3 - object storage. But there are so many S3 API compatible storage providers, there is little “lock-in”

But the fact is that lock-in is overrated. Your CTO is statistically as likely to move their entire infrastructure just because a few engineers promised it would be “seamless” as your DBA is going to move away from their Oracle installation because developers “used the Repository Pattern to abstract database access”.

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Blackstone4 2642 days ago
I feel like often people want to have their cake and eat it. As in they want both freedom to switch services easily and easy-of-use. What I am saying is that ease-of-use sometimes comes at a cost and that cost is lock-in.

No one is forcing you to use AWS. You could build your own private cloud datacenter, implement OpenStack, configure k8 and deploy your docker containers. If a server fails, replace it. Install your updates etc. To me that sounds like a lot of work (assuming I don't have a large organisation behind me) and I would rather have some of that setup for me. It's a trade-off...

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