Is vendor lock-in a pervasive fear among tech pros? Not when it comes to the cloud, according to a new survey by DigitalOcean. Some 77 percent of the 1,000 developers, sysadmins and tech pros surveyed by the cloud-technology company said that vendor lock-in wasn’t a factor when choosing a cloud service. That’s a considerable shift from just a few years ago, when the need for on-premises servers and hardware made it difficult for corporate tech pros to easily switch vendors—a fact that bigger tech vendors often used to their advantage when negotiating contracts and fees. That’s not to say the switch between cloud-native platforms is seamless; porting massive amounts of data is always a headache. Nonetheless, the tech pros tasked with maintaining their company’s data and infrastructure don’t seem overly concerned about their cloud vendors keeping them in a proverbial headlock. The survey offered some other interesting tidbits about the tech pro lifestyle. Some 37.2 percent of respondents reported working with “mostly closed” code, whereas 28.3 percent said they used “mostly open,” and 32.6 said “a bit of each.” (Yes, that doesn’t add up to 100 percent, because 2 percent of respondents said they don’t work with code. Those folks, we presume, are managers.) In terms of languages, some 28.4 described PHP as their “language of choice,” followed by JavaScript (20.9 percent), Python (19.2 percent), Java (6.9 percent), and Ruby (6.1 percent). To a much smaller extent, they also gravitated toward Golang (4.5 percent), C# (3.8 percent), C++ (2.7 percent), and “Other” (7.5 percent). Some 20.7 percent named MS Visual Studio/Visual Studio Code as their preferred development environment, followed by Atom (17.6 percent), Vim (13.3 percent), Sublime (6.8 percent), and Eclipse (4.2 percent). That’s a pretty diverse mix of environments and code. Whatever their tools of choice, though, it’s clear that tech pros who work with the cloud don’t fear their vendors trapping them. Tech Pros Don't Fear Cloud Vendor Lock-In
Is vendor lock-in a pervasive fear among tech pros? Not when it comes to the cloud, according to a new survey by DigitalOcean. Some 77 percent of the 1,000 developers, sysadmins and tech pros surveyed by the cloud-technology company said that vendor lock-in wasn’t a factor when choosing a cloud service. That’s a considerable shift from just a few years ago, when the need for on-premises servers and hardware made it difficult for corporate tech pros to easily switch vendors—a fact that bigger tech vendors often used to their advantage when negotiating contracts and fees. That’s not to say the switch between cloud-native platforms is seamless; porting massive amounts of data is always a headache. Nonetheless, the tech pros tasked with maintaining their company’s data and infrastructure don’t seem overly concerned about their cloud vendors keeping them in a proverbial headlock. The survey offered some other interesting tidbits about the tech pro lifestyle. Some 37.2 percent of respondents reported working with “mostly closed” code, whereas 28.3 percent said they used “mostly open,” and 32.6 said “a bit of each.” (Yes, that doesn’t add up to 100 percent, because 2 percent of respondents said they don’t work with code. Those folks, we presume, are managers.) In terms of languages, some 28.4 described PHP as their “language of choice,” followed by JavaScript (20.9 percent), Python (19.2 percent), Java (6.9 percent), and Ruby (6.1 percent). To a much smaller extent, they also gravitated toward Golang (4.5 percent), C# (3.8 percent), C++ (2.7 percent), and “Other” (7.5 percent). Some 20.7 percent named MS Visual Studio/Visual Studio Code as their preferred development environment, followed by Atom (17.6 percent), Vim (13.3 percent), Sublime (6.8 percent), and Eclipse (4.2 percent). That’s a pretty diverse mix of environments and code. Whatever their tools of choice, though, it’s clear that tech pros who work with the cloud don’t fear their vendors trapping them. 
