Cloud computing offers significant benefits but also risks vendor lock-in through proprietary services like Amazon Lambda, Google TPUs, and Azure Notebooks. While cloud vendors compete on genuinely beneficial features like cost and availability, they also create specialized services designed to make switching expensive. The antidote is adopting open standards like Kubernetes and Parquet, which force cloud providers to offer interoperable options and preserve users' freedom to migrate. The post urges public institutions to evaluate lock-in risks when choosing cloud services and encourages open source developers to focus on open standards rather than proprietary tooling.
Aug 19, 2018 Open SourceDistributed Computing