[Cloud lock-in] Overview and pros and cons of cloud lock-in / Azure
Radu Vunvulea
VP of Cloud | Cloud Strategy and Transformation | Microsoft Regional Director | Microsoft MVP
I will start a series of posts about how we can avoid cloud lock-in and interoperability between managed cloud services and external systems using different solutions on the market.
Cloud lock-in Overview
There are multiple definitions on the market, but when we talk about cloud lock-in or vendor lock-in, we refer to direct and indirect costs of a platform to be moved from one cloud vendor to another.
The lock-in makes customers more dependent on a cloud vendor, and migration to another vendor becomes expensive. There are multiple dimensions of cloud lock-in that we need to be aware like:
We need to be aware that cloud lock-in comes with advantages, especially from the time-to-market and cloud economics point of view.
Cloud Managed Services like Azure App Services, Azure Service Bus, Azure Redis Cache help us build a platform in no time. The effort required to build the infrastructure and implemented the NFRs (e.g., availability, redundancy, backup and recovery) is drastically reduced, together with the SLA that are provided for each Cloud Managed Services. It is much easier for the support team to manage the services that are out of the shelve offered by cloud vendors like Azure or AWS.
Should I go ALL-IN?
Going all-in for a cloud vendor provides a high level of agility and the effort required to manage the infrastructure, stack components like cache or DB and middleware are very low. Using this approach there is more time to invest in security, scalability, DR and HA and cloud managed services competencies.?
Pros and Cons
The most important cons of a cloud lock-in are:
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The pros of cloud lock-in are:
The real challenges
?Large organizations have a strategy to avoid cloud lock-in. This can be achieved at the program level, ensuring that different parts of the systems run in different cloud vendors or by building the systems to run seamlessly (more or less) on multiple cloud vendors.
The real challenge is finding the right balance between Cloud Managed Services (PaaS and SaaS) and the ones you managed by yourself.
?In the last few years, adopting containerization solutions like Kubernetes combined with different solutions like Dapr enabled us to achieve a higher level of interoperability with less effort and a high degree of loosely couples between cloud services and the application.?
The out of the shelf integration and abstraction layer that Dapr offers, give us the ability to switch between AWS SNS and Azure Services Bus without making changes at the application layer. Kubernetes enable us to run the same application inside AWS EKS or Azure AKS seamlessly.
There are many other ways to handle cloud lock-in and each of them will be discussed in a series of articles.
Is cloud lock-in so bad?
YES and NO
There are many aspects that need to be taken into account when you decide what level of cloud lock-in you want to have. You can find below a list of items that need to be taken into account when you take such a decision: