> I am not sure why you (and every other person that replied) assumes that I am suggesting an in-house solution when I explicitly wrote "freedom to choose between vendors".
I used "build in house" as a simple example of a broader principle--if there is a "freedom to choose" option that magically lets you migrate from one platform to another at zero cost while imposing no overhead over the AWS solution, then absolutely you should do it. But generally these solutions require a significant up front investment and rarely actually deliver on their promise of abstracting away the underlying platform (now you're wed to $ABSTRACTION on AWS, for example), but that's another story.
> That's pretty much the textbook definition of debt.
Nonsense. That's not debt, it's deciding to wait to pay for something in cash until you know you want to buy it. It's not debt to wait to spend $30K (cash) on a car until you're sure you want to buy it. The "tech debt" analogy is intended to convey interest--you know you want to change course but you do the expedient thing now knowing that you're going to continually bump into it (each bump is "interest") until you can pay it off properly. This is the opposite--if you build it in house or use a dodgy "platform-agnostic" abstraction, you're going to be paying interest on something you will very likely never even need!
I used "build in house" as a simple example of a broader principle--if there is a "freedom to choose" option that magically lets you migrate from one platform to another at zero cost while imposing no overhead over the AWS solution, then absolutely you should do it. But generally these solutions require a significant up front investment and rarely actually deliver on their promise of abstracting away the underlying platform (now you're wed to $ABSTRACTION on AWS, for example), but that's another story.
> That's pretty much the textbook definition of debt.
Nonsense. That's not debt, it's deciding to wait to pay for something in cash until you know you want to buy it. It's not debt to wait to spend $30K (cash) on a car until you're sure you want to buy it. The "tech debt" analogy is intended to convey interest--you know you want to change course but you do the expedient thing now knowing that you're going to continually bump into it (each bump is "interest") until you can pay it off properly. This is the opposite--if you build it in house or use a dodgy "platform-agnostic" abstraction, you're going to be paying interest on something you will very likely never even need!