What is vendor lock-in?
Think about a scenario where you need to use a particular service or a product from a particular vendor. Then you choose the product or service and buy it with the relevant support. Once you purchase the product or service, according to the contract, support provided, the technicality of the product, proprietary technologies, we tend to get stuck with that vendor for everything.
Major reasons for vendor lock-in
- The cost of switching to a new vendor is high.
- Proprietary software
- Financial pressures
- Insufficient workforce
- Avoid any interruptions to the business
Real-world example:
Imagine a company that wants to provide coffee for its employees. And this vendor has the requirement of a specific coffee machine to make and supply coffee for the employees. Imagine an issue with the quality of the coffee that this vendor provides with time. Turning to a new vendor would mean that these specific coffee machines would be useless. Since the coffee-making equipment needs replacement and involves considerable funding, the company is stuck with this vendor and less quality coffee.
What is vendor lock-in in cloud computing?
When a company goes for a cloud solution, they look for infrastructure or software as a service solution. Once the applications and infrastructure are set up and databases are set up, it’s a huge overhead to change the cloud services provider as database migration would involve the complete reformat of data in the new environment. And also, once the third-party solutions are integrated into the cloud solution, the company becomes dependent on the cloud vendor.
Ways to avoid vendor lock-in
- Identify complex dependencies in your solution.
- Understand the commonalities in your solution.
- Considering the possibilities of upgrading before migrating.
- Educating the stakeholders on all the aspects of the solution.
- Make applications open source and portable.
- Employ modern software development life cycle methodologies.
- Developing a clear exit strategy initially.
- Considering a multi-cloud strategy.
Microservices strategy for non-vendor lock-in
- Because the individual microservices focus on a single work process, the larger applications are not affected by a single point of failure.
- eliminates vendor and technology lock-in as individual microservice components can use the technologies independently and have their own databases.
- Rolling back changes is more manageable as there won’t be many dependencies, and there is more flexibility with less coding.
- With individual services focusing on individual business use cases or processes, the developers easily understand the functionality.
- Microservices provide the flexibility of smaller and faster deployments.
- The most important and needed services can be scaled individually.
Benefits of using Codeobe for above
- Codeobve works on any cloud on any repository Codeobe supports Github, GitLab, BitBucket, and Azure Repos, and you could deploy your runtime in any of the major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) within your data centers. Therefore, you don’t need any migration effort, which means you can move between clouds per your requirements.
- Value – You can pick and choose your vendor depending on tech advancements and budget, even at a later stage.
- Codeobe provides less complexity in managing and monitoring the microservices.
- Even though the platform is Codeobe, you can freely develop and test your microservices as it is mainly based on Java. This technology is understood by many, and even any issue arises, you can solve those on your own.
- Codeobe is a MiPaaS that takes care of the entire development life cycle of the microservices.
- Using Codeobe requires no special experience involving a low/no-code approach.
- Not limited to the connectors that come with Codeobe, you can write your own connectors.
- You can expect from the ideation to the deployment in hours which provides faster release cycles and flexibility.
- Looking for a root cause is very easy as all actions are appropriately logged.
- This is cost-effective, and you can scale as you go.
