How do you flag something as an ad? This article started out as a naive discussion of the issues associated with working with cloud vendors and morphed into a sales pitch for something nobody wants - essentially another cloud API.

Let's have a real discussion of choosing a cloud provider, the pros and cons of and whether, or how to avoid vendor lock-in.

If you want to be cloud agnostic you can do that today by selecting infra components that are not vendor specific. There are many good reasons to do that but in my experience you can do better by going all in with one cloud provider.

The cloud is hard. Gaining experience and expertise on multiple platforms is even harder. Sure it sounds great to be able to play the big 4 (I'm excluding IBM but I am including Oracle here, but really nobody should choose Oracle unless their sales people have seriously greased your wheels and you happen to use Oracle) cloud vendors against one another for the best price. And sure, if Google, AWS, or Microsoft wants your company it would be best to be on their cloud - but really? how many startups are going to be acquired by those companies?

Finally, the "oh I'm not getting the performance I need from this provider" is a failure of your engineers to vet the services they are using for your use cases. I'd also point out that these vendors want their services to perform. They listen to customers. Establishing a solid relationship with them can yield better support and even customizations if your spend is high enough. Having one foot out the door is not the way to build a strong relationship. Moreover, scaring people with "anecdotes" about cloud providers' evil ways is no way to sell your product to the public.