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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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So does the unity engine and that doesn't make it any less closed source.
That's not what I meant by "runs on Linux." I mean the software that makes AWS servers function, behind the scenes, is Linux. You're allowed to install whatever you want on a server if you rent a server from AWS, but the software that allows you to rent a server from them and lets you set up your own server is.... Linux.
AWS servers run on an operating system that is a CentOS/RHEL flavor of Linux that has been heavily modified by Amazon for their use-case.
The vendor lock in from AWS doesn't come from just using EC2 servers. EC2 is just linux servers, like you say. You could run them anywhere. In fact, if you're just running AWS EC2 servers without leveraging their other features, particularly auto-scaling, you're probably just setting money on fire. Everything EC2 offers can be done much cheaper at a different host.
The AWS lock-in comes when you expand to their other services. Route 53 DNS, Relational Database Service, Simple Email Service, etc etc. AWS offers a ton of different services that are quite useful, and they add new ones all the time. And if your company uses a bunch of them, and then realizes they need to leave AWS, doing so is incredibly painful. Which is the point.
If you hard code their services into your product, sure. But you should be abstracting away from that. Then it's just writing new plugins instead of redesigning everything.
Abstracting away is costly. You can target only the lowest common denominator. The abstractions are going to leak. It's like the criticism of ORMs, only worse since SQL is at least standardized.