I think it probably isn't purely the use of lambda/serverless but the creep of other things that make it more difficult to leave. Stuff like cognito or SNS or other services. Once you start using AWS, each individual choice in isolation looks cheaper and easier to just use something AWS provides. Once you start utilizing 7+ different AWS services it becomes very expensive to transition to another platform.
Also, this conversation is very different if you are an early stage company racing to market as opposed to an established organization where P&L often takes precedence over R&D.
At my previous place I saw this in reverse. Over the previous years we had invested in building up our own email infrastructure.
Because so much had been invested (sunk cost fallacy), no-one could really get their heads around a shift to SES, even though it would have been a slam dunk in improved reliability and developer productivity.
Whereas if we were on, say, Mailgun, and then someone wanted a shift to SES, that debate could probably have been a more rational one.
I just point this out to say that investing in your own infrastructure can be a very real form of lock-in itself.
Other way around, you'd be surprised at how much infrastructure you can buy by forgoing AWS's offerings (for large work scales.)
For small companies, you may not be able to afford infrastructure people, and moving fast makes way more sense. There's little point in paying for an ops person when you have very little infrastructure.
At a certain scale though, AWS stops being cost effective. You begin to have room in your budget for ops people, you get room to afford datacenter costs, and you can start paying for a cloud architect to fill out internal or hybrid cloud offerings using openshift or openstack.
>Yeah, Netflix's opinion is to use Amazon as little as possible.
This is simply untrue. Everything but their CDN uses AWS.
>Their critical infrastructure (the CDN) is not anywhere near the slimy grip of AWS.
The streaming website and app aren't critical infrastructure? Databases containing all of their business and customer details aren't critical infrastructure? Encoding content so it can be delivered by the CDN isn't critical infrastructure?
That's like saying I don't trust Ford because I buy Michelin tires while I drive a Fusion.
The CDN is in the ISPs data center. You can’t get much lower latency than that. But if Netflix is AWS’s largest customer, I doubt they are using it as little as possible.
Netflix does presentations every year at ReInvent about how they use AWS and they have a ton of open source tooling they wrote specifically tied to AWS.
This is the same model of buying things on amazon too -- once you've bought once, it's easier to buy again. Why spend time going to another shop when you can just use amazon to buy multiple things.
This ease of use philospohy goes way back to the one-click patent. If I want DNS, why wouldn't I go to amazon, which has all my finance details, and a decent interface (and even API), rather than choosing another DNS provider, setting up my credit card, and having to maintain an account with them. So I choose DNS via AWS. Then I want a VPS, but why go to linode and have the overhead of another account when I could do lightsail instead?
And then I can use Amazon Certificate Manager, create a certificate attach it to your load balancer and cloud front distribution and never have to worry about expiring certificates - and they are free.
Also, this conversation is very different if you are an early stage company racing to market as opposed to an established organization where P&L often takes precedence over R&D.