* You should not be locking yourself into proprietary functionality of a cloud provider unless you are deeply interested in what happened to Oracle customers getting raked over the coals happening to you.

* DevOps teams can be multi-cloud relatively easy when using infrastructure as code tooling (Terraform, Packer, etc) and traditional DevOps practices

* Why manage a fleet of vanilla boxes when you can use vanilla boxes with Kubernetes and not get gouged by cloud providers in the first place?

You don't need to jump off the hype train if you never got on in the first place.

Proprietary managed services can save a lot of dev/setup/SRE time though. Many businesses have more pressing things to work on than spending dev time to prevent vendor lock-in.

Everyone spends their runway differently. Once you’re off the ground, derisk.

Most companies don't have a "runway", they are just bootstrapped and have to actually justify their expenses and lock-in every day.

if I voluntarily choose a provider at a price that’s acceptable to me am I being gouged?

Not yet, but it seems obvious to me that the GP was referring to a situation where the price changes and then you are getting gouged. That's exactly what the negative connotations of lock-in refer to.

Each provider will seek to make you take their one true path, or you need to do your own engineering.

Using the providers path isn’t necessarily gouging, but it isn’t cost optimized either. The answer depends on you.

That said, cloud is like any tenant/landlord relationship. Your rights are linked to time and are whatever your contract provides. If you didn’t like Office 2007, you didn’t buy it. If you don’t like Office 365, 2021 edition, too bad.

It's not quite that black and white. You can use common/open APIs and cross-provider tooling whenever available and provider-flavored ones where necessary. It's more effort, but still less than hand-rolling everything.

Of course that only works as long as you're swapping out largely replaceable parts. If you built everything around some proprietary service then yeah, you've tied yourself to that anchor.

This seems overly negative. There are lots of ways to do hybrid clouds, especially if you’re doing it for only the more critical parts of your application.

> why use a cloud provider at all?

Cost+speed of scalability, and managed services. If you rarely need to scale, your workloads are all predictable, and you don't need managed services/support, you should just buy some VPSes or dedicated boxes.

Staying on current versions, and the ability to scale usage up and down?

Why would you want to lock into a cloud provider? You're losing a lot of operational flexibility for less devops and sysaadmin work.

You are really limiting your tech stack by using standardized things like Jenkins, Docker, K8, mqtt, kafka.

It's not really that I "want to lock into a cloud provider". Sometimes I simply don't have the human bandwidth available to handle devops and sysadmin work while building the actual product.

"Outsourcing" those functions to cloud services can be big win for a small team. Like all engineering, it's a trade off.

For the same reason you want "to lock in" (meaning use) any solution. You do not want to build or operate it yourself. Why don't you take this further? Why to use a water utility if you can just drill your own wells? Most businesses are better of on cloud because their core business is not to build and operate datacenters but provide services to their customers (on the top of datacenters running their apps).