The Myth Of Vendor Lock-in
The cloud has revolutionized how businesses operate, but we often get stuck in weeks-long project delays trying to avoid vendor lock-in. This article highlights whether this is something you should be concerned about, or if your efforts are best focused elsewhere.
I guess it is best to start on what vendor lock in actually is.
Understanding Vendor Lock-in
Vendor lock-in occurs when a customer becomes reliant on a specific vendor’s products or services, making it difficult or expensive to switch vendors.
The business risk here is usually either:
That one vendor could raise prices, and you would be stuck paying the higher price (VMware/Broadcom comes to mind)
Vendor has multiple outages, or poor support (VMware/Broadcom comes to mind)
The vendor goes bankrupt, or is acquired by a competitor, and your business along with it
The Cloud Hyperscaler Landscape
Cloud hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have significantly mitigated the risks of vendor lock-in. Here’s why:
Open Standards, Open Source, and Interoperability:
Hyperscalers increasingly embrace open standards and APIs, Containers, and Kubernetes is one example with every cloud having multiple ways to run standard docker containers, and these can be moved between clouds, with no changes.
Each cloud does have proprietary services, especially when we look at databases, but the effort to migrate and modify these is typically way lower than it has been in the past.
Using one of these databases to avoid vendor lock-in with AWS/GCP/Azure can also just mean you are locked into MongoDB, or an open source DB that is hard to move from.
Bankruptcy:
If any of these vendors does go bankrupt it will be a slow process, Google, Microsoft or Amazon are some of the wealthiest companies in the world, so I think we can discount this.
Data Portability:
Hyperscalers offer tools and services to simplify data migration and portability. While moving large datasets can still be complex, the process is becoming more manageable, hyperscalers will often fully or partially fund the migration from a competitor.
In addition highly performant network connections between clouds are available or even physical devices to move the largest of datasets quickly.
Market Competition:
The intense competition among cloud hyperscalers drives down prices, there has only been a few times where some services increased in cost.
This competition is not likely to reduce in the near term.
Mitigating Vendor Lock-in Concerns
While the risks of vendor lock-in are lower with cloud hyperscalers, if this is a concern there are a few steps to mitigate the effort if you ever do need to migrate:
Design for Portability: Architect applications and data structures with portability in mind from the outset
Avoid Proprietary Services: Minimize reliance on vendor-specific databases that lack equivalents on other platforms
Conclusion
The cloud hyperscaler era has resulted in strong competition which has significantly diminished the concerns of vendor lock-in. Open standards, data portability, and market competition have allowed businesses to focus less on lock-in and more on transforming their business.
While some level of lock-in will always exist, it is about choosing where you are locked in, if you go all open source, and build your own servers you will be locked in to using this stack. We believe the focus should shift from fearing vendor lock-in to strategically leveraging the cloud’s capabilities to drive innovation and business growth.
