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Comment by awjr | Hacker News Reader

Well, when we looked at moving stuff to the 'cloud', Amazon offers so so much. In effect Amazon can provide a vendor lock-in through the range of services (and their quality) it provides. That is in no way a bad thing, but just shows how other 'cloud' providers need to keep playing catch-up.

It's also an architecture consideration for the way we develop. Yes you want to use this Amazon feature, but if you do, moving to another provider becomes harder (e.g. we're looking to use SQS, but know if we moved provider I'd need to implement my own solution for that, probably mq rabbit).

To rehash a classic phrase: "Nobody ever got fired for buying Amazon."

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SQS works fine when used from other hosting providers (or even from client-side JavaScript for that matter - with the right IAM token).

Anyone think a remote directory service would work well if a lot of your infrastructure is hosted elsewhere? I wonder if latency would become an issue.

Also, how hard is it to set up/care/feed a basic directory service? I've toyed with FreeIPA which was easy (http://www.freeipa.org/page/Main_Page, based on 389 DS). I actually did not realize Samba now includes a directory service and might check that out.

> Also, how hard is it to set up/care/feed a basic directory service?

Setting one up is pretty easy. The problem comes in when you find yourself depending on it, and then it gets out of whack, or Just Grows and you've got OUs and CNs all over the place.

At my last employer - a mid-sized manufacturer - we had several Tier II apps. These must be in working order or production is shut down. The shop floor application. Core ERP. Email. Above II is I which are applications that must exist or the company cannot operate.

There was only one Tier I application: Active Directory.

I burned a couple of weeks trying to setup a replicated freeipa environment. I was amazed that I could start with a brand new instance, run the same script and end up with different problems every time.

I can't say for certain, but I'd think a lot of this is actually built on top of OpenLDAP, with Samba just providing the compatibility layer for Windows clients.

Since a big AWS selling point is headcount savings from outsourcing systems expertise, you would ideally be hiring an infrastructure engineer to implement the RabbitMQ, or at least to smooth the way.

Since when is vendor lock-in a "in no way a bad thing"?

"Lock-in through the range of services" is key. You can go all-in on AWS and use RDS, Directory Service, EMR and still be able to move off AWS and use the open source systems beneath. Granted, there are services like S3 that are proprietary but on the other hand you can move to something Riak CS that provides API compatibility with S3.

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