

Appfog Takes On Amazon Lock-In With OpenStack - zeroecco
http://gigaom.com/cloud/appfog-takes-amazon-to-task-for-cloud-lock-in/

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1qaz2wsx3edc
I feel Amazons lock-in is further reaching then just switching providers. As
plenty of vendor applications (PaaSs) have latency issues outside of ec2.

That said, OpenStack itself is pretty awesome.

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res0nat0r
I don't understand how AWS services keep being described as 'lock-in'.
Shouldn't this post be titled: Appfog Offers Alternative to AWS With
OpenStack?

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ajross
I'm inclined to agree. The whole point to AWS, and in fact the reason for it's
success in the face of determined competition from AppEngine, is the fact that
the virtual hosts are "just Linux boxes" and that S3 is "just static file
storage". Cloning those interfaces (or architecting an app to be portable
across equivalents) really isn't difficult at all.

The rest of OpenStack is just cloning the administrativia, honestly. Only the
most rigorously scaled AWS app, for instance (I'm thinking about things like
Reddit here), is going to need the programmatic ability to spawn EC2 hosts,
etc... At the startup scale, that's just bandwidth you'd be better off
spending on your product's value, not cost savings.

So, I'm all in favor of OpenStack. But I don't think that cloning Amazon's API
is going to win anyone any business. You have to beat them on price and
quality. We'll see.

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bmelton
Some people are using EC2 far beyond 'hosting a website'. If you're leveraging
the EC2 interface to stop and start instances on demand (say, to power per-
user instances for an application) then you're 'locked in'.

DynamoDB could be equated to Mongo or Redis, but it isn't either one of those
exactly, so the switching cost is slightly higher than if it were.

SES is basically there to replace standard SMTP, but it isn't standard SMTP,
so the switching cost just went up a little more.

Beanstalk is (as I understand it, could be way off here) similar to Glassfish
or Weblogic (for Java), but again, isn't quite, so your switching costs go up
again.

Etc., etc.

I don't necessarily disagree that lockin doesn't just happen, you get there by
choosing to leverage non-standard components, vs. standing up another instance
and running Mongo or SMTP, etc., but it's hard to make the decision not to
leverage those things when they're there, available, and look and feel similar
to the tools you need, but aren't.

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res0nat0r
Isn't this like saying by choosing Oracle as your database you are 'locked in'
to it vs. MySQL? I'm locked-in to OSX right now typing this on my Macbook Air.

I think the phrase lock-in should apply only when a vendor makes it
purposefully difficult to get your data out of their system only so you keep
paying them, not when you freely opt-in to their service since it is the best
choice for you at the time.

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cardmagic
Lock-in is a function of the time and effort it takes to move to an
alternative solution, not just the data but the entire system.

Think of beanstalk, think of the dependence on proprietary queuing systems.
The more services you use, the more locked-in and the harder it is to decouple
your systems from AWS.

The lock-in is not visible if you think of AWS as EC2, the lock-in is how hard
it is to build your apps dependent on all the AWS services and try to move
anywhere else.

