Cloud and Insurance

When you design your system, in most of the cases, it seems like designers taking things to be granted that Cloud will solve you most of your fault tolerance headache. Though this is true for some extend, being a system architect, you need to evaluate features of different Cloud vendors before choosing. You need to evaluate features technically without falling into the marketing traps of vendors. Mind you there is something called vendor locking. After you choose (or marry) a vendor, it is very difficult to change your vendor locking. 

I see a similarity between the cloud vendors and the insurance industry. Both are unfortunately running heavily on marketing myths. 

If you look at, Sri Lankan society before around three decades, we were a society that was not much considered about fear. Fear is something you need to introduce if you want to be  success in the insurance industry. So what did they do? They brought fear into society by means of Teledramas. What we had in teledramas? Suddenly, your spouse dies from a Moter Bike accident. Then they introduced a new scheme of insurance for Motor Bike. I can tell many stories reference to these insurance marketing.  

 In Europe, they called soap operas as the prime idea of these operas were to market soap. So we can call our teledramas, Insurance Teledramas.

After Insurance companies expand over society, now it has become something we cannot ignore. Further, you know the hassle that you need to undergo when it comes to claiming. I have a feeling that the Cloud industry will take the leaf out from the book of insurance. 

Finally, I am not saying NO for clouds, but you need to be careful with the marketing slogans of Cloud vendors before we fall into the Vendor locking trap.