How to Prevent Cloud Lock-In with Robert

6. October 2020

In this video, Robert demonstrates how you can prevent cloud lock-in with Terraform. Terraform allows you to describe your infrastructure as code and lets you decide on what cloud you want to use.

In this vlog, Robert de Bock will give you a short explanation about what “Cloud Lock-in” is and how you can prevent it.

What is a Cloud Lock-In

Cloud Lock-in is the situation where you can’t get away from a cloud provider because you are using many resources that are specific to that cloud provider. By using those resources, you are not able to move your workload somewhere else. Although these cloud provider services are nice to use, you basically lock yourself into a specific Cloud provider by using them.

An Example

Robert shows you Cloud formation from AWS as an example. It is a solution for everything-as-code and infrastructure-as-code. So it is a descriptive language where you can describe all the resources you need, could be machines, could be load balancers. These examples are very specific to AWS. Works well, but in this case only specifically for AWS: You’re locked-in.

The Solution

Terraform is an alternative to that. Like AWS’ Cloud formation, you describe your infrastructure as code, but Terraform is independent of any specific cloud provider. You can use the services from all cloud providers. You can even mix. So, you could for example build a machine on one cloud provider and have the load balancer on another cloud provider, how fancy is this?!

The code of Terraform is a little different from the code of AWS’ Cloud formation, but maybe you recognize that some resources.

Do you also want to be independent of your cloud providers? We’ll help you!