“Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of proprietary lock-in” (2017)

Re:“Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of propr... by james_s_tayler on Monday February 04, 2019 @08:02PM (#19082263)

I think perhaps not all vendor lock-in is created equal. I too shudder at the thought of walking into another Oracle like trap, but it's also an error in cognition to make the assumption that all vendors will lock you in to the same degree and in the same way.

I guess the part of us that is cautioning ourselves and others are aware of the pitfalls, but others also have valid points around going all in.

There is a matrix of different scenarios let's say.

  You can go all in on a vendor and get Oracled.
  You can go all in on an abstraction that lets you be vendor agnostic and lose some velocity while gaining flexibility.
  You can go for a vendor and perhaps it turns out that no terrible outcome results because of that. 
  You can go all in on vendor agnostic and have that be the death of the company.
  You can go all in on vendor agnostic and have that be the reason the company was able to dodge death.

Nobody can read the future and even "best practices" have a possibility of resulting in the worst outcomes. The only thing for it is to do your homework, decide what risks are acceptable to you, make your decision, take responsibility for it.

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Re:“Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of propr... by dr01d on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @03:05AM (#19083683)

Vendors have 2 core requirements to continue operating: get new customers and keep the existing ones. Getting new customers requires constant innovation, marketing spend, providing value, etc. Keeping existing customers only requires making the pain of leaving greater than the pain of staying.

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Re:“Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of propr... by james_s_tayler on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @06:05AM (#19084262)

Sure. And from even from that you still can't infer what outcome will materialize. If you made the technically correct decision and your business went under because of it, that is still gonna hurt no matter which way you look at it. Hence the advice is do your homework, figure out which risks are acceptable to you, make your choice and take the responsibility. There is no magic bullet to picking the right option. Only picking the option you can live with because that's what you're going to have to do regardless of the outcome.

You might know all the theory on aviation and be a really experienced pilot and one day a sudden wind shear might still fuck you.

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