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Avoiding Vendor Lock-In

Control Your Infrastructure Costs

Research-backed strategies to maintain negotiating power with cloud providers and reduce Total Cost of Ownership.

The Serverless Lock-In Trap​

The Decision: "Go all-in on [Cloud X] serverless."

The Wall:

  • Vendor-specific APIs everywhere
  • Costs spike unpredictably at scale
  • Migration means rewriting everything

Result: The financial trap closes. You're stuck with soaring bills or facing a migration project that diverts engineering from business value. Either way, vendor lock-in eliminates your negotiating leverage and control over infrastructure costs.

The Research Speaks​

It's not just us saying this — studies, industry data, and even regulators validate the need for architectural flexibility to avoid vendor lock-in and control costs.

Industry Reality:

  • 78% of organizations pursue hybrid or multi-cloud strategies specifically to avoid vendor lock-in and reduce costs (Fortinet 2024, 451 Research/S&P Global 2020)
  • 2/3 of CIOs want to avoid cloud vendor lock-in, yet 71% of companies still end up heavily tied to a single provider using dozens of that provider's services (Bain & Company 2020)
  • This creates a massive challenge: leaders recognize the risk, but traditional approaches make true portability nearly impossible

40% Cost Reduction​

"Hybrid architectures can run at 40% of the cost of single-cloud setups."

— Skedulix, IEEE Cloud 2020

Multi-cloud scheduling achieves significant cost savings by dynamically selecting optimal execution environments.

85% Fewer Violations​

"Mixing VM-based and serverless resources cut SLA violations by 85% and costs by 53%."

— LIBRA, 2021

Hybrid deployments provide better reliability and cost efficiency than single-architecture approaches.

Substantial Barriers​

"Vendor lock-in … demands substantial effort to overcome existing barriers."

— Opara-Martins et al.

Technical and economic switching costs create long-term constraints on architectural evolution.

Even regulators agree: egress fees and technical barriers discourage switching. The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA, 2025) highlighted these as major concerns in cloud markets.

Cloud Cost Comparison​

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Keep the Cost of Changing Your Mind Near Zero​

The real cost of lock-in isn't just money — it's opportunity cost. Every day spent rewriting for a new runtime is a day not spent building features or serving customers. Migration projects divert your best engineers from delivering business value. Pikku prevents this by dramatically reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of your infrastructure.

Reducing Infrastructure Risk & Controlling Costs​

Pikku lowers TCO through architectural flexibility:

  • Avoid expensive migrations — No rewrite projects that divert engineering from business value when you need to change clouds or execution models
  • Control costs as you scale — Always run on the most cost-efficient infrastructure for each component (start serverless, move to VMs when economics shift)
  • Maintain vendor leverage — Never get trapped by a single cloud provider raising prices. You can switch without pain.
  • Accelerate time-to-market — Your team builds features instead of managing infrastructure transitions

Example: Cost Control as You Scale​

Nearly half of cloud-based businesses struggle to control costs as they scale, often because switching to cheaper alternatives means costly rewrites. With Pikku, you continually choose the best price-performance option for each workload—no rewrite needed.

Day 1: Start serverless on AWS Lambda — $0/month (free tier), instant auto-scaling

Month 6: Traffic grows — still on Lambda — $200/month, no ops overhead

Year 1: Steady high traffic — switch to dedicated VMs — $80/month, 60% cost reduction

Year 2: Hybrid approach — critical paths on VMs, burst handling on Lambda — optimal cost/performance

Same code. Different economics. Zero rewrites.

The Bottom Line​

Build once, run anywhere. Keep the cost of changing your mind near zero.​

In a world where requirements change overnight, flexibility is the optimization.

Pikku ensures you can adapt infrastructure without burning time or money on rewrites. Your architecture becomes a competitive advantage, not a constraint.

Strategic Value​

Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO):

  • Avoid expensive cloud migrations and maintain leverage with vendors
  • No rewrite projects that divert engineering from business value when switching platforms
  • Always run on the most economical infrastructure for your scale

Reduce Infrastructure Risk:

  • Never get locked into one cloud, architecture, or execution model
  • Maintain negotiating power with cloud providers
  • Adapt to regulatory requirements (on-prem, specific regions) without rewrites

Accelerate Time-to-Market:

  • Build features instead of managing infrastructure transitions
  • Respond to market changes faster than competitors
  • Focus engineering effort on competitive advantages, not platform migrations

Further Reading​

Research References​

Next Steps​

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