While this idiom generally refers to the concept of avoiding the investment of all of ones energy or resources into a single venture at the risk of losing everything, in this context, the risk of locking in to a single vendor is a different cost: budget, manpower and time. When migrating an application to the cloud and selecting a cloud service provider, this cost weighs heavily on the mind of every IT manager.
So what is vendor lock-in? How can it affect cost? Vendor lock-in refers to the measures that different service providers take to ensure that customers will have a difficult time when trying to migrate away from the vendors ecosystem.
It creates an environment where a customers business becomes completely reliant on the support of a single vendors products and services. With many organizations making use of a range of services from cloud providers (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and FaaS), there is a great deal of potential for vendor lock-in to apply. Todays vendor lock-in is tomorrows technical debt.
When an organization does not diversify where their applications are running (IaaS, PaaS) and tightly couples their business logic (SaaS, FaaS) with a single cloud provider, a wide variety of issues can occur.
As your company innovates, so too do cloud service providers. New products and features are constantly being shipped, with each provider looking to keep a competitive edge. If your systems and services are tightly integrated with a single cloud provider, it is much harder to move away if that cloud provider doesn't remain competitive.
Some cloud service providers use proprietary methods to store data and configure services. While these methods typically make it much easier to use the vendor platform, it also creates an environment that is not portable. Migrating your applications to a different provider will become cumbersome.
Restricting your business to a single cloud provider limits you to its roadmap. If another provider starts offering a service that is ideal for your specific needs, you won't be able to take advantage of that.
It also restricts development teams from choosing the best tool for the job and can slow down onboarding of new teams, as they have to migrate to your chosen vendor. When going through mergers and acquisitions, being locked in also slows down the process of integrating a new company's technology and could even place restrictions on what can be integrated.
Although cloud providers boast impressive SLAs with all the nines, outages still happen, taking your services down with them. Lock-in may pose substantial challenges in defining failover and disaster recovery strategies.
Ensuring the portability of your organization's applications is a good place to start when looking to avoid vendor lock-in.
Data is the most valuable commodity to a service provider and oftentimes the hardest piece of an application to migrate. Keep it in a common format to allow migration from platform to platform. Cloud service providers make it easy to use their proprietary managed data management platforms.
Steer clear of using proprietary data tooling in favor of using more open, widely used database management systems. MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB are three great open source options that provide a premium feature set while enabling efficiency and scalability.
Leveraging open source technologies and modern standards will help to avoid being locked in to any proprietary standards. For example, OpenAPI specifications are the norm for designing and documenting APIs. Well-designed and documented APIs will allow for the maximum portability between platforms.
In the DevOps realm, using an open source system such as Jenkins can integrate with any cloud provider. If your organization is making the move to a container-based or microservice architecture, consider using Kubernetes for deployment and scale orchestration.
When developing applications, maintaining an open-format-first approach will help to select the best tool for the job. Selecting tools based on strengths, rather than vendor merit, will help to avoid using one cloud service provider for everything. The basics of writing good software apply too.
Ensure that the application is broken up into manageable, reusable components - that it is well organized, designed in a way that is easy to understand and is well documented. Keeping these values in mind will help to build a highly portable system. Maintaining portability will make it easier to switch between different service providers when the time comes.
When deciding how or where an application is going to run, there are many viable alternatives to using a single cloud service provider. There are pros and cons with the following infrastructure patterns, but having options will allow teams to implement the best design for their use cases.
For: The organization most concerned with security and governance that wants complete control over data, hardware and software
Avoiding the cloud altogether means you need to invest in infrastructure upfront, provision sufficient capacity and retain expertise. This approach can be expensive; however, it does provide organizations with the highest level of control over their applications and services.
For: The organization that wants the same level of control that on-prem provides with the added flexibility and scalability of the cloud
Some organizations choose to build their own virtual private cloud (VPC). While building your own comes with setup costs and requires expertise for ongoing maintenance, a VPC ensures you keep control of your own data.
For: The organization that wants maximum flexibility in its managed services
A multi-cloud approach involves multiple cloud services platforms rather than one. The risk is spread and allows you to choose best-of-breed solutions. This approach does require specialist knowledge of a variety of platforms and providers but also helps when negotiating for the best price per platform.
For: The organization that wants the flexibility of multi-cloud, coupled with the control of on-prem and private cloud architectures
A hybrid cloud (combination of on-premises and multi-cloud) approach is the best of all worlds. It retains flexibility, spreads risk and allows you to choose the best option for different use cases. This architecture can help to increase the agility and innovation needed to react to business demands, while persisting operational autonomy.
Vendor lock-in can come in different forms, but the outcomes can be the same:
Cloud service providers make it easy to become locked in to their products and services. The ease of use may limit the overhead upfront but may prove to be costly in the long-term. Building agile applications and using open formats on top of a variety of infrastructural patterns will help to avoid putting all of your eggs in one basket.
To learn how how to help your organization reduce the risk of vendor lock-in and help with managing APIs in a multi-cloud or hybrid configuration, check out this webinar or eBook.
Ever wonder how Netflix streams to millions of users without crashing? Or how Amazon powers billions of transactions daily? The secret sauce behind these scalable, resilient behemoths is microservices architecture. If you're a developer or architect
If you take a step back and think about today’s software development landscape, you could argue that documentation is just as important as the code itself. That’s because traditional documentation workflows — where documentation is manually updat
As cybersecurity takes the main stage, organizations face a significant challenge: how do you strike a balance between maintaining a high level of security and ensuring employees have enough data access to perform their jobs properly? Role-based ac
A RESTful API is a type of application programming interface that follows the guidelines of Representational State Transfer (REST). Its goal is to present data models and functions in a clear and standard format. RESTful APIs use common web techno
APIs, or application programming interfaces, are sets of functions and procedures that serve as bridges between applications, dictating how services interact within an ecosystem. They specify accepted requests and their formats, enabling seamless da
Open banking initiatives have taken flight in many economies across the globe, standing at the forefront of a rapidly evolving financial services landscape. Predicated on the open access of banking data for the overall benefit of customer choice, Op
Choosing the right API architecture is crucial for building efficient and scalable applications and the two prominent contenders in this arena are GraphQL and REST, each with its unique set of characteristics and benefits. Understanding the similari
