[toomuchtodo]

* You should not be locking yourself into proprietary functionality of a cloud provider unless you are deeply interested in what happened to Oracle customers getting raked over the coals happening to you.

* DevOps teams can be multi-cloud relatively easy when using infrastructure as code tooling (Terraform, Packer, etc) and traditional DevOps practices

* Why manage a fleet of vanilla boxes when you can use vanilla boxes with Kubernetes and not get gouged by cloud providers in the first place?

You don't need to jump off the hype train if you never got on in the first place.

[opportune]

Proprietary managed services can save a lot of dev/setup/SRE time though. Many businesses have more pressing things to work on than spending dev time to prevent vendor lock-in.

[toomuchtodo]

Everyone spends their runway differently. Once you’re off the ground, derisk.

[jjeaff]

Most companies don't have a "runway", they are just bootstrapped and have to actually justify their expenses and lock-in every day.

[tomcam]

if I voluntarily choose a provider at a price that’s acceptable to me am I being gouged?

[tjr225]

Not yet, but it seems obvious to me that the GP was referring to a situation where the price changes and then you are getting gouged. That's exactly what the negative connotations of lock-in refer to.

[Spooky23]

Each provider will seek to make you take their one true path, or you need to do your own engineering.

Using the providers path isn’t necessarily gouging, but it isn’t cost optimized either. The answer depends on you.

That said, cloud is like any tenant/landlord relationship. Your rights are linked to time and are whatever your contract provides. If you didn’t like Office 2007, you didn’t buy it. If you don’t like Office 365, 2021 edition, too bad.