alt Hacker NewsOnce they convince you that you can’t do it yourself, you end up relying on them, but didn’t develop the skills you would need to migrate to another provider when they start raising prices. And they keep raising prices because by then you have no choice.
Replies
ch2026 • yesterday at 5:10 PM
Wait, are you talking about cloud providers or LLMs?
citizenpaul • yesterday at 4:57 PM
I have not tested this in real life yet but it seems like all the argument about vendor lock in can be solved, if you bite the bullet and learn basic Kubernetes administration. Kubernetes is FOSS and there are countless Kubernetes as a service providers.
I know there are other issues with Kubernetes but at least its transferable knowledge.
There is plenty of provider markup, to be sure. But it is also very much not a given that the hosted version of a database is running software/configs that are equivalent to what you could do yourself. Many hosted databases are extremely different behind the scenes when it comes to durability, monitoring, failover, storage provisioning, compute provisioning, and more. Just because it acts like a connection hanging off a postmaster service running on a server doesn’t mean that’s what your “psql” is connected to on RDS Aurora (or many of the other cloud-Postgres offerings).