The Lock-In Monster
This week, TNS Correspondent Emily Omier writes about whether concerns over lock-in are warranted in this cloud era. “Lock-in,” as the Martin Fowler website explains “makes switching from one solution to another difficult. Many architects may, therefore, consider it their archenemy.”
But is it, really?
“Concern about cloud lock-in is probably overblown and likely counterproductive,” Omier writes. She is backed by Donnie Berkholz, executive in residence at Scale Venture Partners, who asserts that industry-wide fear of lock-in is a holdover from the days when enterprises ran their own data centers. Lock-in means the service provider can charge exorbitant rates, knowing the costs to move operations elsewhere would be even more prohibitive. But this is not how things actually work with cloud providers, Berkholz said.
Corey Quinn, cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, seconded that assessment. “At scale, everything becomes negotiable,” he explained. The extra engineering required to make a company’s workloads truly cloud portable, through cloud native open source, for instance, would cost more than whatever savings that could be had by avoiding lock-in.
“Very few companies spend more on their AWS bill than they do on payroll,” Quinn said. “People’s time is the most constrained and expensive asset companies have. Do you want them maintaining a database or fixing whatever business problem your company solves?”
Are you afraid of the "Lock-In" Monster? Or nah? Drop us a line and let us know!
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