The cloud should be easy to use and easy to leave.

They operate at a scale almost nobody can match, but customers still pay premium prices. AWS alone generated $45.6 billion in operating income in 2025, around 57% of Amazon's total, even though Amazon sells almost everything.

Scale made infrastructure cheaper for them, it should make it cheaper for you too. Profit is good, we are all for it, but profits this large tell us customers probably have too little choice, or feel they have none.

Most people believe a complex system eventually becomes married to one provider. That is not a law of software, it is a design choice.

Applications, databases, persistent disks, and their data can run without proprietary cloud lock-in.

This portability gives you a better position to negotiate cloud costs and the freedom to run wherever you want, even inside your customer's infrastructure, no matter where they run.

Most cloud migrations are treated as long, risky, and expensive projects. They do not need to be.

The path is simple: depend less on proprietary managed services, use more open-source infrastructure, and operate it with the right supervision, knowledge, and help.

The entire system can then move together, including applications with disk dependencies and all their data, so changing providers becomes safe, boring, and easy.