Five Ways to Protect Against Vendor Lock-In in the Cloud

At Joyent, lock-in is something we take pains to avoid and we do our best to make sure that anyone can come and go as they please. Granted, its never easy migrating complex applications from one cloud to another. But if you have to switch clouds in a hurry or planning to add diversity your cloud exposure, there are ways to make the process easier.

Here's an excerpt from my post on GigaOm including the basics on how to avoid being stuck in application hosting situations where you're at the mercy of a provider's whims:

1. Avoid vendor lock-in at all costs. This is now a no-brainer. Make sure that your app can be easily ported to other clouds if you need to move due to service outages. If you must write apps that require serious customization, make sure you have a back-up plan and, if you can swing the cost, an alternative cloud running your code as a backup.2. Know thy PaaS. Spreading the risk among multiple PaaS providers makes a lot of sense – unless they are all totally dependent on one big cloud to deliver your applications and cloud business. Explore installable PaaS options that you yourself control. So ask pointed questions about where your PaaS is running and how they are managing their risks of failure of a big cloud.3. Ask hard questions about redundancy and system architecture. Deep under the covers of most clouds are core system architectures that may replicate single-points-of-failure. That’s because, at its core, the cloud infrastructure ecosystem is not a terribly diverse environment. Only a few hardware and software companies rule the roost. Similarly, ask your cloud provider to completely open their architecture and software kimono and let you examine everything. If they won’t, then you caveat emptor. If they will, you can judge their redundancy steps for yourself. So ask for specific architecture diagrams if you are going to be dependent on a cloud environment and its reliability. And get a network engineer or system architect buddy to review the diagrams. Think this is overkill? Ask FourSquare, Reddit and the other huge sites that have corporate backing or VC money and went down hard in the EC2 outages.More at GigaOm »

Photo by Jan Kaláb.



Post written by alexsalkever