Don't get locked up into avoiding lock-in

Legal lock-in : You may be locked into a specific solution for legal reasons, such as compliance. For example, you might not be able to migrate your data to another cloud provider's data center if it's located outside your country. Your software provider's license may also not allow you to move your systems to the cloud even though they'd run perf

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A significant share of architectural energy is spent on reducing or avoiding lock-in. That's a rather noble objective: architecture is meant to give us options and lock-in does the opposite. However, lock-in isn't a simple true-or-false matter: avoiding being locked into one aspect often locks you into another. Also, popular notions, such as open s... See more

Version lock-in : Besides being locked into a product, you may even be locked into a specific version. Version upgrades can be costly if they break existing customizations and extensions you have built (SAP, anyone?). Other version upgrades essentially require you to rewrite your application - AngularJS vs. Angular 2 comes to mind. To make matters

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Skills lock-in : As your developers are becoming familiar with a certain type of product or architecture, you'll have skills lock-in: it'll take you time to re-train (or hire) developers for a different product or technology. As skills availability is one of the major constraints in today's IT shops, this type of lock-in is very real. Some niche e

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For example, many architects favor not being locked into a database vendor or cloud provider. However, how likely is a switch really? Maybe 5%, or even lower? How much will it cost you to bring that switching cost down from let's say $50,000 (for a semi-manual migration) to near zero? Likely a lot more than the $2,500 ($50,000 x 5%) you can expect ... See more

Product Lock-in : Related, but different is being locked into a product. When migrating from one vendor's product to another vendor's, you are usually changing both vendor and product, so the two are easily conflated. Open source products may avoid the vendor lock-in, but they don't remove product lock-in: if you are using Kubernetes or Cassandra,

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Mental Lock-in : The most subtle, but also the most dangerous type of lock-in is the one that affects your thinking. After working with a certain set of vendors and architectures, you are likely to absorb assumptions into your decision making, which may lead you to reject alternative options. For example, you may reject scale-out architectures as

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Platform lock-in : A special flavor of product lock-in is being locked into a platform, especially cloud platforms. Such platforms not only run your applications, but they may also hold your user accounts and associated access rights, security policies, infrastructure segmentations and many more aspects. They also provide application-level service

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Vendor Lock-in : This is the kind that IT folks generally mean when they mention "lock-in". It describes the difficulty of switching from one vendor to a competitor. For example, if migrating from Siebel CRM to SalesForce CRM or from an IBM DB2 database to an Oracle one will cost you an arm and a leg, you are "locked in". This type of lock-in is c

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This great convenience and productivity booster also brings a whole new form of lock-in. Hybrid/multi-cloud setups, which seem to attract many architects' attention these days, are a good example of the kind of things you'll have to think of when dealing with lock-in. Let's say you have an application that you'd like to deploy to the cloud. Easy en... See more