I hear this a lot, but it's a silly argument. Lock-in doesn't come from using the special services. It comes from your data being hard to move.
Before I moved reddit from a datacenter to AWS, I was "locked in" to my datacenter. It took weeks to get all the data out and into AWS.
Working around their special services isn't all that hard. Nothing AWS offers is that hard to replicate outside of AWS if you want to. The hard part is getting your data out.
So if you're going to put all your data into AWS anyway, you might as well use their services and save yourself some time and effort reinventing what they've already done. If you really need to move out later, then make the investment in rebuilding the tools they offer.
Comments
I hear this a lot, but it's a silly argument. Lock-in doesn't come from using the special services. It comes from your data being hard to move.
Before I moved reddit from a datacenter to AWS, I was "locked in" to my datacenter. It took weeks to get all the data out and into AWS.
Working around their special services isn't all that hard. Nothing AWS offers is that hard to replicate outside of AWS if you want to. The hard part is getting your data out.
So if you're going to put all your data into AWS anyway, you might as well use their services and save yourself some time and effort reinventing what they've already done. If you really need to move out later, then make the investment in rebuilding the tools they offer.