Stuck in Amazon's web tentacles yet? You will be soon Cloud portability desperately wants to be a thing, but there’s a far greater force pushing against it. It’s called Amazon Web Services (AWS), and chances are you’re already stuck. Oh, sure, you can cling to containers as a way out, as Bloomberg’s Olga Kharif recently wrote. But containers won’t help you. Not when you’ve given …
We're a heavy user of AWS services like EC2, VPC, S3, RDS, ELBs etc. Quite frankly, they've been a revelation, enabling us as a small business to build complex, scalable, load-balanced network architectures that would otherwise be outside our financial reach or core expertise. Since moving to AWS, we've created services that we simply couldn't have built via a standard hosting model and offered them to the market.
You could host with AWS and not use services like RDS for your database, of course, but then you're not really using it as a cloud proposition and you're not unlocking the benefits. I haven't used Azure, but I imagine it isn't quite as far down the road as Amazon, though doubtless it's good.
I'll happily accept the dependence we now have on AWS for the advantages it has conferred - it has been utterly transformative for us.
As for the previous gentleman's comment "Some of us avoid Amazon as irrelevant".... in what way are they irrelevant?
"Jake is running a pig farm"
Horse ranch, primarily. We also grow hogs, sheep, goats, chickens and other food.
"not a server farm"
I have a small server farm here on the ranch. I manage about a dozen larger ones.
"somewhere innawoods of Montana (?)"
That's Sonoma, California. Can't read for content, DAM?
"and is ready for zombie apocalypse."
There is no such thing as zombies. Never have been, never will be.
"So of course it's not particularly relevant for him."
It's not relevant for me for the simple reason that it's not relevant. I have absolutely zero need for Amazon. Neither do you. Trust me. Think about it.
This is where Google screwed up and Amazon got things exactly right.
It's like the frog and boiling water thing.
Google made their cloud available explicitly as platform as a service. Easy to get started, infinitely scalable but no visibility under the hood and no portability to other providers. Enterprises voted resoundingly against.
Amazon set up an Infrastructure as a Service platform that drew vast numbers in and then started to throw out features so tempting that developers and systems administrators really ought to use them. By slowly turning the key in the lock after your data is already in the system they make it much harder to notice that you're getting trapped.
But how am I getting "trapped" in tools that I couldn't have had before, in which I can accumulate skills and know-how to move OFF the so-called trap?
On a similar tack, during the industrial revolution, starving peasants had the "choice" to stay put in the countryside or move into the "trap" of large cities and join the throngs working in industry. And so it went...
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