I ran across an article last week about the fear of cloud lock-in being a “key concern of companies considering a cloud move“.  The article was spot on in pointing out that dependence upon some of the higher level public cloud service features hinders a user’s ability to migrate to another cloud.  There is a real risk in being locked into a public cloud service, not only due to dependence on the vendor’s services, but also the complexity and costs of trying to move your data out.  The article concludes by stating that there “aren’t easy answers to this problem“, which I think is true…but I also think by simply keeping two things in mind, a user can do a lot to mitigate the lock-in risk.

1. Choose an Independently Produced Operating System

Whatever solutions you decide to deploy, it’s absolutely critical that you choose an operating system not produced by the public cloud provider.  This recent fad of public cloud providers creating their own specific OS is just history repeating itself, where HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, and AIX are being replaced with the likes of GCEL and Amazon Linux.  Sure, the latter are Linux-based, but just like the proprietary UNIX operating systems of the past, they are developed internally, only support the infrastructure they’re designed for, and are only serviceable by the company that produces them.  Of course the attraction to using these operating systems is understandable, because the provider can offer them for “free” to users desiring a supported OS in the cloud.  They can even price services lower to customers who use their OS as an incentive and “benefit”, with the claim it allows them to provide better and faster support.   It’s a perfect solution….at first.  However, once you’ve deployed your solution to a public cloud vendor-specific OS, you have made a huge first step towards lock-in.  Sure, the provider can say their OS is based on an independently produce operating system, but that means nothing once the two have diverged due to security updates and fixes, not to mention release schedules and added features.  There’s no way the public cloud vendor OS can keep up, and they really have no incentive to, because they’ve already got you….the longer you stay on their OS, the more you will depend on their application and library versions, thus the deeper you get.  A year or two down the road, another public cloud provider pops up with better service and/or prices, but you can’t move without the risk of extended downtimes and/or loss of data, in addition to the costs of paying your IT team the overtime it will take to architect such a migration.  We’ve all been here before with proprietary UNIX and luckily Linux arrived on the scene just in time to save us.

2. Choose an Operating System with Service Orchestration Support

Most of the lock-in features provided by public clouds are simply “Services as a Service”, be it a database service,  big data/mapreduce service, or a …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu