HACKER Q&A
📣 _448

How do you ensure it will be easy to switch cloud providers?


How do you ensure from the start of the project that it will be easy to switch cloud provider that you are planning to use at the start? Basically, how do you avoid lock-in to the cloud providers?


  👤 bluefirebrand Accepted Answer ✓
Basically by using as little as possible. Avoid building critical pieces on top of their specialized services.

More or less my approach is if you couldn't build it in a data center with rented hardware, you shouldn't build it in the cloud if you want to avoid vendor lock-in.

This is easier said than done because everyone wants to use all the fancy pre-configured services. Which is fair, it can speed up your development a lot, just at the tradeoff of being locked in.


👤 p0d
Containers. I setup Ubuntu on cloud servers and use lxc for containers e.g. web, database servers.

I could literally copy a folder running my container and be up and running on another provider.

The only other moving parts are nginx on the Ubuntu host proxying to it's own containers.