CoreOS chief decries cloud lock-in

Greeeed is goood

And corporates will do, and say, absolutely *anything* to try to trap customers. Every single one of them has some form of the monkey's fist arrangement, whereby once you have reached in to fondle the goodies, you can't get your hand out while keeping it.

Whether it's Google lying about "confusing customers" when it removes the uSD slot from its phones or Apple gluing batteries in irremovably or MS turning out unnecessary "improvements" to Windows which just happen to require you to be spied on ... readers here could produce endless examples.

Just remember, corporates are not doing any of these things for your benefit any more than Facebook is run for your good: it's all about finding ways to trap you, hold your data hostage and then wring you dry.

If it weren't bad enough that 85% of everything done in "cloud" doesn't need to be there in the first place, worse still are the wiles and deceits and soft persuasions of the providers, always looking for a way to make you dependent. If you're looking for a comparable business model, drug pushing is a fair example.

Well said Alex.

There is nothing wrong with using a proprietary system to execute your idea. There is everything wrong with being so locked in that you cannot migrate to another platform.

A simple one I've got at the moment, an MSSQL database that uses the really cool CTE query function to simplify heirarchies and bills of materials. We can't easily web-ify it cos the current mySQl doesn't do CTE (easily).

Moral beware the shiny shiny stuff.

One Cloud Vendor who is failing to lock anyone in, is IBM. And if you fall for there Automation Tool "Watson" that is advertised as AI, which it most certainly is not, you won't be getting any "shiny" to lock you into anything functional. You will end up with the need to search for another Cloud Vendor who isn't bleeding cash, tossing staff and contractors, and leaving customers short of technical staff to provide the services they paid for....

He's right. At the bottom line, Cloud is about getting customer's locked-in to ensure a consistent revenue stream via subscription services. It's not about freedom, ease of use and flexibility - it's just a way of monetizing the end user or company on a continual basis. Nobody want's to sell you a one off product costing £100 now - they want to sell you the same product for £10pm FOREVER.

Vendors will make it look like you can't afford *not* to be in the Cloud, but once you move your infrastructure/services/data to them, they've got you, and it's very difficult to get out.

I'm not sure why i should care if companies make business decisions to opt for a cloud provider and spend money migrating to the cloud (that part wasn't free either, migration, took a lot of work) and then claim they didn't know they were being locked in? They make conscious decisions. No different to buying a BMW then complaining you can't replace all the parts of your car with Proton parts.

Tired of all this political ideology pervading the IT space. Can't everyone just be responsible for their own decisions without being lectured to?