| Imagine you're an early stage startup. You have a handful of overworked, stressed-out engineers trying to ship v1.0. You don't have the time or resources for a dedicated Ops team, so you go with AWS (I think this is a great use case for AWS or any public cloud, btw--it just makes sense at a really early stage startup). You ship your product, get some customers. Fast forward 18-24 months. You have grown enormously, you have lots of customers and revenue projections and expectant investors. Your (now much larger) engineering team has gotten used to AWS conveniences and leveraged a lot of them in the development workflow. Your architecture consists of several layers of ELBs, you have painstakenly set up autoscaling and deployment via Elastic Beanstalk. Your server backups are AMIs. Your data lives in RDS (analytics in Red Shift). Your webservers use Elasticache. SQS is the backbone of your asynchronous job workflow. Customer email traffic goes through SES. Etc. Now your AWS bill is something like $25-30k/month. You're at the point where the pricing differential between real hardware and AWS is getting big, and it will only get worse over time. Now management has to make the hard choice: - Build an Ops team capable of architecting, constructing and deploying new infrastructure on bare metal - 3-6 months of work to go from design to final cut-over - Risk some business interruption in the changeover (downtime, unexpected problems) and slower development iteration until the engineering team gets used to new tools/ways of pushing code out. or - Continue on AWS and eat the bill as cost of doing business. This is vendor lock-in at the most basic level. |