I think you might be thinking it is a binary choice. Educated decisions can be made to decide if a particular item is worth the lock in or not. For example auto scaling groups in AWS are much faster to set up and maintain than vendor neutral choices. But leaving asg is pretty much the same amount of work as setting up auto scaling anyway. Switching out has cost but not that much. Something like cognito... that’s almost impossible to leave. But more importantly it’s the AWS “glue” between these services that is truly impossible to leave.
I have seen two businesses fail under the weight of AWS billing and be unable to get out from underneath it before they ran out of funding. It’s definitely not something to look at lightly.
And how many companies are successful either because they started on AWS until they found product market fit and they were capitalized well enough to migrate off (Dropbox) or are successfully running their entire business at scale on AWS (Netflix).
How many companies fail because they run out funding - period?
Congratulations, you found two examples out of the millions of companies that exist in this world, both with astronomically greater funding and scale than anyone you or I are likely to work on. Yet people continue to obsess about these unicorns and assume the choices they've had to make are clearly the right choices for everyone.
The greatest problem with modern devops is peoples delusional ideas over the scale upon which they're really operating and where they're really going to start feeling the pinch. I've come across way too many tinpot "we're netflix!" setups that crumble under their own unmanageability as soon as they have budget and staff taken away from them for a couple of quarters.
So you are claiming that there are only two companies that have successfully run a business on AWS?
The reason for managed cloud is the same reason for using any other vendor. To let you focus on your core competencies that give you a competitive advantage. Do you also think companies shouldn’t use Github, Microsoft, Workday, Oracle, SalesForce, Atlassian, etc.?
Do you know how much infrastructure you can buy for the fully allocated code of one employee?
Maybe they know something that you don’t know...
Seeing that even Amazon admits that only 5% of Enterprise workloads are on any cloud provider, who is arguing that it is always the right choice?
I command a higher than (local) market salary for an individual contributor in no small part because of my expertise when it comes to AWS, but I’m the first person to tell someone who asks me for advice when it doesn’t make sense to bother with the complexity and cost of a cloud provider and just use a colo, VPS, or just use AWS Lightsail (AWS’s answer to companies like Linode).
I have seen two businesses fail under the weight of AWS billing and be unable to get out from underneath it before they ran out of funding. It’s definitely not something to look at lightly.