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'Going to the cloud' could also mean locking into a forever sub-contractor

The very brief version: “going to the cloud” can mean renting services/servers that you could get from anywhere. There’s little lock-in. The same four words “going to the cloud” might also mean locking your operations to a specific cloud provider, whose proprietary services will now be part of your business processes “forever”. Be specific which variant of cloud you are signing off on! I’m mostly out of the office but this post was already in the pipeline and I thought it might be useful to get it out.

Added to the above are geopolitical considerations - it is highly inconvenient if mandatory third party services that form an integral part of your software can only be sourced from a degrading democracy across the ocean, traversing trade war barriers. These cloud choices are very difficult to make, yet we currently see them typically being made on an ad-hoc basis, at relatively low levels in organizations, places where geopolitics and long-term strategies are not often discussed. It is indeed the case that if you have lots of clever architects and more or less “full stack programmers” that you can prevent this problem (total dependency) from happening in the first place, or that you can rapidly migrate away should a cloud partner become problematic.

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