Comment by nyrikki

We are probably closer than you think, and SMBs have zero leverage.

The point is not avoiding vendors or duplicating everything. The point is designing systems so the software/platform never becomes the point of control.

A self-hosted, minimal sandbox instance using simple containers and tools is one way to help avoid that lock-in trap.

It is not zero cost, but strategically important to make sure that vendors don't shape your enterprise, but support it.

IMHO Systems should be designed to be as replaceable as possible, without adding the extreme complexity that a true 'multi-cloud' solution would offer as an example.

The point being is that the vendor and/or platform can be replaced anytime the business changes its goals, market shifts, strategies change ...

Keeping the door open and trying to minimize the migration cost is my point, not boiling the ocean.

Repurposing a decomed server or desktop with a GPU (3090 or RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell not DC class) with linux/podman and llama.cpp will help a team understand without much cost, but that is an ignorant of your situation claim on my part.

We both very much agree that upfront multi-vendor implementations are a very bad idea. It suffers from the same problem IMHO, trying to plan past the planning horizon with aspects you have no control over.

Probably too much nuance to discuss here, but thanks for responding.