Cloud Cuckoo Land: When Cloud Customers Get Locked In
April 01, 2016

Sven Dummer
Loggly

Back in the day when the word “cloud” was only used for those things in the sky, software typically ran on local machines sitting in local datacenters. Often, this software was licensed from a vendor on a per-seat basis. Vendors tried their best to make customers renew their license agreements, and vendor lock-in was a common phenomenon.

Such lock-in could be caused by a variety of factors: sometimes purposely caused by the vendors by making migration to competing products unnecessarily hard, sometimes caused by customers being naïve and betting too much of their software stack or infrastructure on the products of one single vendor.

Over the past decade, two factors have made it significantly easier to escape that legacy lock-in model. Free/open-source software has reached a level of maturity and adoption in almost every area of the industry, offering more and more valid alternatives to commercial products.

Secondly, the commoditization of cloud computing removed the need for companies to run their own datacenter.

A Storms A-Brewin'

Cloud providers often claim to offer the perfect escape path from legacy vendor lock-in by providing modular solutions in which customers only pay for what they use, instead of being tied into complex, long-term, per-seat licensing agreements.

However, most cloud providers (in particular the big players) have extended their portfolio over the past few years, offering a broad variety of services that go beyond computing and storage. They provide everything from load balancing and DNS, to messaging, monitoring, log management, analytics, databases, and much more.

It's very tempting for customers to replace more and more components running in their own colos with these in-cloud solutions. Why? Because they typically are easy to set up and they remove the costs of hardware ownership and datacenter footprint.

It's also an easy purchase because a contract with the cloud provider is already in place, and adding (or removing) a service is not much more than a mouse click — no need to negotiate with a sales rep over complicated long-term license agreements like it used to be with many legacy, on-premise solutions (and no need for the provider to deal with selling through fear attempts and related nuisances).

I Can See Clearly Now …

With so many advantages, it is easy to be blind to (or willingly ignore) that these services have huge lock-in potential, and many providers probably exist for exactly that reason. The more of these services a customer uses, the more difficult it is to move their application stack from one cloud provider to another, or to their own datacenter or a hybrid solution.

Whenever companies make decisions to move services to the cloud, it is worth it to thoroughly review the architecture specifically from the perspective of potential vendor lock-in. It might also be worth it to go with solutions that live and function outside of a specific vendor's cloud, even if it is less convenient and maybe more expensive. It's not unlikely that today's convenience and savings will turn into a nightmare and cost explosion tomorrow. There is no such thing as a harmless, one-vendor dependency, not even in the most comfortable and fluffiest cloud.

Sven Dummer is Senior Director of Product Marketing at Loggly.

Share this

Industry News

September 21, 2023

Red Hat and Oracle announced the expansion of their alliance to offer customers a greater choice in deploying applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). As part of the expanded collaboration, Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes for architecting, building, and deploying cloud-native applications, will be supported and certified to run on OCI.

September 21, 2023

Harness announced the availability of Gitness™, a freely available, fully open source Git platform that brings a new era of collaboration, speed, security, and intelligence to software development.

September 20, 2023

Oracle announced new application development capabilities to enable developers to rapidly build and deploy applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

September 20, 2023

Sonar announced zero-configuration, automatic analysis for programming languages C and C++ within SonarCloud.

September 20, 2023

DataStax announced a new JSON API for Astra DB – the database-as-a-service built on the open source Apache Cassandra® – delivering on one of the most highly requested user features, and providing a seamless experience for Javascript developers building AI applications.

September 19, 2023

Oracle announced the availability of Java 21.

September 19, 2023

Mirantis launched Lens AppIQ, available directly in Lens Desktop and as (Software as a Service) SaaS.

September 19, 2023

Buildkite announced the company has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Packagecloud, a cloud-based software package management platform, in an all stock deal.

September 19, 2023

CrowdStrike has agreed to acquire Bionic, a provider of Application Security Posture Management (ASPM).

September 18, 2023

Perforce Software announces BlazeMeter's Test Data Pro, the latest addition to its continuous testing platform.

September 18, 2023

CloudBees announced a new cloud native DevSecOps platform that places platform engineers and developer experience front and center.

September 18, 2023

Akuity announced a new open source tool, Kargo, to implement change promotions across many application life cycle stages using GitOps principles.

September 14, 2023

CloudBees announced significant performance and scalability breakthroughs for Jenkins® with new updates to its CloudBees Continuous Integration (CI) software.