Comment by SassyGrapefruit

3 years ago

>Use the Cloud, but don’t be too Cloudy

The number of applications I have inherited that were messes falling apart at the seams because of misguided attempts to avoid "vendor lockin" with the cloud can not be understated. There is something I find ironic about people paying to use a platform but not using it because they feel like using it too much will make them feel compelled to stay there. Its basically starving yourself so you don't get too familiar with eating regularly.

Kids this PSA is for you. Auto Scaling Groups are just fine as are all the other "Cloud Native" services. Most business partners will tell you a dollar of growth is worth 5x-10x the value of a dollar of savings. Building a huge tall computer will be cheaper but if it isn't 10x cheaper(And that is Total Cost of Ownership not the cost of the metal) and you are moving more slowly than you otherwise would its almost a certainty you are leaving money on the table.

Aggressively avoiding lock-in is something I've never quite understood. Unless your provider of choice is also your competitor (like Spotify with Amazon) it shouldn't really be a problem. I'm not saying I'm a die hard cloud fan in all aspects but if you're going with it you may as well use it. Typically trying to avoid vendor lockin really ends up more expensive in the long run, you start avoiding the cheaper services (lambda for background job processing) for what may never really be a problem.

The one place I can see avoiding vendor lock-in as really useful is it often makes running things locally much easier. You're kind of screwed if you want to properly run something locally that uses SQS, DynamoDB, and Lambda. But that said, I think this is often better thought of as "keep my system simple" rather than "avoid vendor lock-in" as it focuses on the valuable side rather than the theoretical side.