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The other day, I wrote about how every dependency is a potential vulnerability. While that article as about third-party libraries and frameworks, you can make a similar argument about infrastructure vendors. I've used tools like Netlify and Cloudflare. I sometimes recommend them to clients and students. They offer tons of features that can make them faster and easier to get started with than building out your own infrastructure. For example, both Netlify and Cloudflare Workers offer serverless functions that let you run server side code without having to manage a server. Cloudflare Workers even offer a database where you can read/write data for long-term storage. These services are great… until they aren't. Maybe it's a big outage. Maybe it's a big increase in fees or a comically large surprise bill. Maybe it's just a shift in priorities that means the stuff you use and care about is no longer the focus. These things can happen with any vendor. The problem with services like Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare, and so on is vendor lock-in. When one provider handles your hosting, manages automated deployment, runs a few dozen micro-services and serverless APIs, provides your database through their proprietary API, and more, migrating away to somewhere else becomes very expensive—money, time, and the likelihood that something breaks. When a vendor handles just hosting, or just continuous integration, migrating to another vendor is far less risky. It's still a pain in the ass, but there are far fewer places to for things to go wrong. I'm not saying you shouldn't do business with these companies or use there services. But you should go into it knowing that you're locking yourself in to a long-term commitment. Like all things web dev, there are tradeoffs. It's good to know them ahead of time so you're not caught off-guard. If you want help evaluating infrastructure options and making decisions about the various pros-and-cons, get in touch. I love helping my clients figure out how to setup their sites or apps for long-term success. Cheers, Want to share this with others or read it later? View it in a browser. |
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