Controlling access to your application data is the way cloud vendors differentiate themselves. Clouds rely on the fact that, at least most of the time, applications run best when they have high bandwidth, low latency access to the data they need. App data can be hard to move to a different cloud.
Which is why I was thinking of calling this How to make $20B per quarter selling books, but it's not about that really. It's about data. Your data. And selling you access to it.
You can call it lock-in you can call it data gravity but the net net is, once you put your app in a cloud, and start running it there, it's going to generate and store data. Lots of it. Some bits more useful that others. Sure you can move the app somewhere else. And absolutely you can migrate databases and object stores so that when the app runs, it can get to things like user info, or product images. but that'll cost you.
And then what about logs and telemetry? Maybe you'd like to say "just delete the logs" but is your app really set up for that? What else might your app be relying on in one cloud, that's suddenly different or even not present in another cloud?
For a lot of good reasons, both business and technical, you don't pay Amazon to send them data. You do pay them to keep it around, move it from place to place, or send it to someone on the Internet though. In fact, if you're sending to someone on the internet (like maybe a different cloud?) you might pay twice as much to send it as you would to store it there for a month.
So that's how they get you.
But what if you don't need to move that data out at all? If you're putting your primary app-data in storage that's in your own private cloud, you control access to your data, not your cloud provider. Of course you'll need high speed, low latency access to the cloud servers. If you need to cache data out in the cloud for performance reasons though, no problem. Move your cache into place in your cloud of choice, preload as needed, and run your app on that cloud's resources. When you're done with that cloud resource, don't forget to delete the cache.
Of course, the devil's in the details.
If you think you're spending too much on storage, drop us an email. We'll take a look at your situation and see if we can help.
Thanks much,
Brian