Vendor Lock-in

Vendor lock-in is how hard it becomes to leave a provider once you're deep in. The more you build on a cloud's proprietary services, its specific databases, its serverless runtime, its managed everything, the more rewriting it takes to move, and the deeper the lock-in. Egress fees add a literal exit toll, since pulling your data out of a hyperscaler can cost real money in transfer alone.

The trade-off is genuine, not a hollow warning. Proprietary managed services are often the fastest way to build, and refusing all of them on principle means reinventing wheels. Cloudflare's Workers, a hyperscaler's managed pipeline, a PaaS's magic deployment, they save real time, at the cost of portability. The question is how much escape velocity you want to preserve.

The hedge is to keep the core portable, standard databases, containers, open tools, and reserve the proprietary conveniences for places where the payoff clearly beats the cost of one day migrating off. Being a fully committed shop of one cloud is a legitimate choice, as long as it's a choice you made on purpose rather than one you drifted into.