[NSTD] Cloud Vendor Locking

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Cloud provider like Amazon Web Service (AWS) surely has a lot of useful tools that hyped the Software Development Infra, CICD, Integration, Production and etc. One of the things is to have powerful extended services from EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) that bundle other services, let's name a few like Elastic Beanstalk and ECS with EC2. And Another stuff that is popular with AWS is AWS Lambda, the service that provides developers to do serverless stuff applications. Lambda provides environment and infrastructure (server, base network, access) provisioning and it can be controlled by limited config that can be predefined and in some cases can be changed. There are also third-party tools that quite strong adapt the lambda implementation such as https://serverless.com

If You exploring lambda, You likely know that it will work easier with No SQL database since Mysql will cost us at connection pool while lambda container can run concurrently when a lot of requests are coming at the same time. Imagine that 100 requests come together, lambda will also create up to 100 containers that will do connection to Mysql. Although there is an RDS proxy that was recently introduced, I haven’t success utilize it. Amazon has dynamodb that works easier with lambda. And the benefit to follow the pricing schema with lambda will seem fit for some people.

You need to well understand the journey of Your business before deciding to use native features from AWS like lambda paired with dynamodb. If Your business is bind by country/region regulation like a fin-tech solution, You must reconsider using it if no AWS service in your operating country. There is a chance that Regulator requires You to put your application, server, data at the same location as Your business operates and this is what vendor locking means. The hurdle to re-do / revamp the application to make it work outside AWS lambda and dynamodb are very hard, while Your business is already running.

It is wise that when developing an application we use something simple, proven, well independent, and flexible. Start small with classic concept app server production with load balancer and high availability, I think that suffice and would be fit in most of the business. If Your business is scaling fast, let's invest in the Containerize (e.g. contained, docker), Kubernetes, and terraform stack. That stuff is quite flexible and common to any cloud provider like google, amazon, azure, etc.