I hate lock-in and I’ve seen the same problems you discuss here. Nobody likes to feel powerless or over a barrel.
The other solution is to use common components (standards or oss) and then you have nobody to rattle your saber at when it breaks.
But two of those options are for the most part self-inflicted by the developers. The other one is usually inflicted by management (vendor lock-in).
Re:Amazon Aurora Backtrack
by scarface74 on Friday May 11, 2018 @02:28PM
(#17049700)
It's even worse when you lock yourself into your own garbage. At least locking yourself into a framework that other people use you have a chance to find someone with the same issue and there are people outside of your company that know how to use it -- as opposed to your own bespoke framework.
I’ve seen it happen time and time again. Companies write their own frameworks, build systems, hardware provisioning systems, analytics systems, you name it... all to avoid “lock in”.
All of that home brew stuff usually sucks. Almost all of it becomes abandonware that one or two people in the company know how to change. Why? Cause all that stuff has nothing to do with how the business delivers value. All of it should have been provided by third party packages.
But now the company got big and they are locked into shitty homebrew garbage that would take a massive political and engineering effort to get out of.
Moral: it is just as easy to lock yourself into your own garbage as it is to lock yourself into a third party. Leave stuff that doesn’t add value to your business to people whose business it is to build that stuff. Beware of doing everything in-house.