Avoiding Vendors Lock-in

The notion of “avoiding vendors lock-in” in information technology is interesting. I would argue that it’s impossible to completely be without some sort of vendor lock-in¹. At some point, there is always a required commitment level. You commit to open-source software. You commit to a cloud vendor. You commit to a platform. I often give the example of a company building an application internally with a team of developers. In that scenario, the company is committing to something: the application, the data tied to it and its operational model. Applications are hard to replace in many environments. When you decide to invest in software development, you commit to the end product for many years, if not decades, until the organization decides it’s time to transform the application into something else². There is this concept of “security by design” and of “portable by design,” which should apply to any technical or application architecture. The rest is marketing nonsense.