Cloud lock-in: Why the enterprise doesn't care

3 years ago 525

Commentary: Companies person been selling occurrence cures for exertion lock-in for years, but customers person higher priorities.

When are we going to larn to halt trying to merchantability ideologies? Customers should privation open, unified entree to their fiscal information stored crossed antithetic banking providers, arsenic promised by the U.K.'s Open Banking initiative. But, apparently, they don't, with adoption of open banking inactive anemic aft 3 years. "Customers are not influenced to power banks due to the fact that they tin instrumentality their information with them," Starling Bank CEO Anne Boden said. "Customers power banks due to the fact that they privation a amended service."

SEE: Research: Video conferencing tools and cloud-based solutions predominate integer workspaces; VPN and VDI little fashionable with SMBs (TechRepublic Premium)

At larger scale, and for akin reasons, enterprises should eschew the lock-in that comes from buying into a peculiar unreality vendor's services, particularly serverless functions that tightly necktie a lawsuit to the unreality provider's infrastructure. And they should ne'er take proprietary bundle implicit unfastened source. But enterprises support buying into cloud, with adoption of serverless options accelerating, and they support utilizing proprietary software.

This isn't due to the fact that people, oregon enterprises, are sick informed astir their options. Not usually. No, it means they person antithetic priorities. And the apical priorities look to beryllium speed, flexibility and productivity.

Business outcomes, not spiritual dogmas

Take the large declaration U.K. spy agencies precocious inked with AWS. As reported by the Financial Times, "The declaration is apt to ignite concerns implicit sovereignty fixed that a immense magnitude of the UK's astir concealed information volition beryllium hosted by a azygous US tech company." Actually, it's much apt to spark lawsuits from rival unreality providers that privation the concern (because that's what the large clouds bash with their lawyers—see here and here, for example).

No 1 seems to beryllium acrophobic with the crushed for the unreality spend, however. Ciaran Martin, erstwhile caput of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre, said the woody would alteration the spy agencies "to get accusation from immense amounts of information successful minutes, alternatively than successful weeks and months." It's not astir nationalist sovereignty; it's astir getting worldly done.

SEE: AWS Lambda, a serverless computing framework: A cheat expanse (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

In a akin manner, an enforcement from a ample security company, speaking connected the value of serverless to Simon Wardley of DXC Technology, stressed that the determination isn't astir technology, per se–it's astir focusing connected concern outcomes:

During the clip it took for the vendors to travel backmost with quotes to the RFP, we had the strategy built successful serverless, successful accumulation and reducing outgo per transaction from $20 to yet 8 cents. There's a cognitive burden. You tin person a serverless squad focused and taking connected reducing costs of transactions, velocity of claims and the tasks astatine hand, oregon you tin person a squad focused connected the intricacies of instrumentality distribution. We're an security company. We attraction astir lawsuit outcomes, not infrastructure clusters.

Years agone past CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi called AWS Lambda, the company's flagship serverless offering, "one of the worst forms of proprietary lock-in we've ever seen successful the past of humanity." He was possibly close successful presumption of licensing and hardware (because serverless locks you to a information center, not conscionable a portion of hardware, and you ne'er really get to entree that hardware), but incorrect successful presumption of the value of that fact. A institution could debar that lock-in by ... penning each the underlying bundle (event model, deployment model, etc.) But that's a batch of work, with a comparatively puny payoff. Hurray! You avoided lock-in! And for your efforts you bought yourself irrelevance arsenic much nimble competitors physique connected the differentiated services that cloud/SaaS providers offer. Small wonder, then, that a Datadog analysis showed that companies are invoking Lambda serverless functions 3.5 times much often successful 2021 than 2 years ago.

All of which is simply a agelong mode of saying that if your vendor's superior selling constituent is an ideology, alternatively than a speedy way to affirmative concern outcomes, instrumentality your concern elsewhere.

Disclosure: I enactment for MongoDB, but the views expressed herein are mine.