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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, the real brunt of my question was why one would go with a cloud-provider specific operating system over one from a group like Canonical or RedHat, as I would naively expect it to have less support and particularly less ecosystem-wide understanding and experience while not being available for other systems, and so it would seem like an easily-avoidable source of vendor lock-in. If I were be part of Camp RedHat I would personally use CentOS, not "Amazon Linux", unless there was some extremely good reason why Amazon Linux in specific was awesome.

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> it would seem like an easily-avoidable source of vendor lock-in

I have the same question / concern.

I think it's great that AWS are offering their own flavour of Linux, but doesn't that result in added risk of vendor lock-in?

Whereas with an Ubuntu instance, one can change cloud providers quite easily [0], without being tied into AWS-specific Linux configurations [1].

[0] I think AWS is great, so this is more a hypothetical scenario.

[1] I say this knowing little about AWS Linux and the degree to which it has custom configurations that can't easily plug-and-play on other distros.

Would appreciate insight from someone who can speak to this risk from experience.

AWS’ flavor of Linux is open source, though. You can run it anywhere, not just Amazon. I don’t see this as a vendor lock in issue, personally.

Ideally you build your software such that the OS is just an implementation detail that’s abstracted away. In the server world a switch from RHEL to Ubuntu is not as hard as a move from, for instance, Google BigTable to AWS DynamoDB

Besides going the path of least resistance in AWS, possibly to get OS & package support from AWS if there's already an enterprise-level support plan in place, rather than needing to buy other support subscriptions (eg, RHEL)?

AM2 is able to run in other places so there doesn't seem to be much vendor lock-in compared to a service like DynamoDB, though.

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