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by lobstrosity420 1142 days ago
> especially early on when my focus should be testing my product, not optimizing my cloud infrastructure for scale that might never be needed

Not to mention vendor lock in, something that really needs to be talked about more with this new wave of function this and edge that.

2 comments

Avoiding vendor lock-in always sounds nice in theoretical discussions, but in practice it needs to be weighed against the cost of additional development time.

In the past decade I’ve been on several teams that went out of their way to avoid vendor lock-in by refusing to use platform service offerings.

Every single time it was a complete waste of time. We could have saved a lot of time by embracing platform offerings and then trying to port to a different vendor only if necessary.

Really depends on the use case. When you don't need the extra features of the AWS load balancer+API gateway over, say, a relatively straight forward nginx/caddy installation. The time to learn the AWS equivalents over off the shelf OSS is pretty similar. Why not just use the OSS all things considered?

There are significant downsides to a lot of the vendor offerings, they seem like a simpler solution but they are plenty complicated in their own right. Particularly since they are probably built to accommodate varied and complex cases that you don't really need. And rarely is this paired away under some special dialog for power users, often you are expected to just know everything up front.

You are absolutely correct here for most businesses.

Howvever, there are many companies working within heavily regulated sectors that unfortunately need to be able to evidence a rapid ability to switch platforms AND exactly where data is stored and processed.

As such using very specific offerings in cloud providers is unfortunately not always an option. Something that is portable, even at expense of complexity or available dev time, becomes a non negotiable.

Vendor lock in? Next can be self hosted, deployed on AWS/Amplify/Lambda, your own hardware, etc. I wouldn't say it's as locked in as some other solutions out there.
it is. Some features only work on their edge runtime !