Cloud neutral?

[arctangent]

Regarding https://github.com/NHSDigital/software-engineering-quality-framework/blob/master/patterns/outsource-bottom-up.md

Ref: "Cloud native vs cloud agnostic"

I think you are very slightly implying cloud neutrality in this section but I don't think it would hurt to be more forward - we should be able to move entire services from one cloud provider to another if we want to. This would mean avoiding very niche components of each cloud in favour of commodity services (e.g. a PostgresDB is likely to be more or less the same regardless of which cloud it is in, and so this would be a more portable choice).

[andyblundell]

Hi - what this is trying to say is that we shouldn't lock ourselves in to a vendor for no good reason (i.e. by accident) but that it's ok to be locked in if we are content that the positives of being locked-in outweigh the negatives ("understand lock in" rather than "avoid lock in"). For example we might decide that using machine-learning service X means we're locked in to a vendor, but the effort of throwing that solution away and moving to a completely different service Y with another vendor is far less painful than building something transferable in the first place, so the lock-in is a good thing. Does that make sense?

[arctangent]

Your argument makes sense, but I think I value portability so highly that where a solution can be developed using agnostic components then it should be. ("Can" encompasses a lot, including whether we have access to the skills or time to build our own thing.) Maybe I worry too much about price gouging and know too little about the commercial arrangements we are able to secure - how far into the future can we evaluate costs in order to perform the comparison you refer to, and would we have enough runway before a price hike to migrate to an affordable solution?