[OzzyB]

I get your point, but your looking at it backwards now, we're past the days of PaaS because we now know were it all leads: lock in -- and I say this as an early adopter of GAE and watched it turn from "something that does all you need out of the box to run an app" to something that nickel and dimes you at every turn and then presents you with a nice fat $bill if you do anything serious on the platform (just look at the bandwidth charges ffs!).

If by lock-in that means higher margins for these major cloud providers then the only remedy is to have a free market, and the only way to achieve that is for us to have the ability (or at least the threat) to take our stuff and run.

In short, the word is out now that there is no "free cloud lunch" they're making $billions off of us for what we once called hosting (clever trick!). Yes, we want the promise of "Cloud" but not all of us are SnapChat and/or willing to pay the high premium for it.

[speedplane]

> I get your point, but your looking at it backwards now, we're past the days of PaaS because we now know were it all leads: lock in ... I say this as an early adopter of GAE and watched it turn from "something that does all you need out of the box to run an app" to something that nickel and dimes you

Lock-in is fine when you're small, it only becomes problematic when you're big. PaaS platforms are not well suited for big organizations for precisely this reason. However, they're great for trying out something new quickly and having it scale without thinking about it. But Google (and others), realized the real money is not in startups wanting a PaaS platform, but in large enterprises, which are far more sensitive to lock-in.

In the ideal world, they'd provide systems like GAE and make it easy to later convert each service (e.g., database, memcache, tasks, email) to a finely tuned system.