I don’t know about you, but whenever I buy a computer, I go to the store, see which computer is the cheapest and has the features I want, and pull the trigger regardless of the brand. This is the perfect example of a King Market. It is difficult to differentiate yourself and stand out, and there is little to no brand loyalty among consumers.Personal computer operating systems – Whenever I buy a new computer, I make sure that the computer comes with Microsoft Windows, the undisputed market leader in the space. Yes, the Macintosh operating system has been around for a long time. Linux has been around for a while, making some noise. The Google Chrome operating system is making some inroads, especially in the educational market. But ever since it was launched in November 1985, Microsoft Windows has kept the lion’s share of the market (or should we say the gorilla’s share?).Of course, this is a subjective opinion, but I believe we are witnessing the biggest Gorilla Game in the history of computing with the advent of cloud computing. This is the mother of all competitive wars. Cloud vendors are not only competing to provide basic services, such as compute and storage but are continuing to build more services on top of these core services to lock in their customers further and further. Vendor lock-in is not necessarily a bad thing. Lock-in, after all, is a type of golden handcuff. Customers stay because they like the services they are being offered. But customers also realize that as they use more and more services, it becomes more and more expensive to transfer their applications and workloads to an alternate cloud provider.Not all cloud services are highly intertwined with their cloud ecosystems. Take these scenarios, for example:

• Your firm may be using AWS services for many purposes, but they may be using WebEx, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Slack for their video conference needs instead of Amazon Chime. These services have little dependency on other underlying core infrastructure cloud services.
• You may be using Amazon Sagemaker for artificial intelligence and machine learning projects, but you may be using the TensorFlow package in Sagemaker as your development kernel, even though Google maintains TensorFlow.
• If you are using Amazon RDS and choose MySQL as your database engine, you should not have too much trouble porting your data and schemas over to another cloud provider that supports MySQL if you decide to switch over.

It will be a lot more difficult to switch to some other services. Here are some examples:

• Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL proprietary database only offered by AWS. If you want to switch to another NoSQL database, porting it may not be a simple exercise.
• Suppose you are using CloudFormation to define and create your infrastructure. In that case, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to use your CloudFormation templates to create infrastructure in other cloud provider environments. Suppose the portability of your infrastructure scripts is important to you, and you are planning on switching cloud providers. In that case, Terraform by HashiCorp may be a better alternative since Terraform is cloud-agnostic.
• Suppose you have a graph database requirement and use Amazon Neptune (the native Amazon graph database offering). You may have difficulty porting out of Amazon Neptune since the development language and format can be quite dissimilar if you decide to use another graph database solution like Neo4j or TigerGraph.
• As far as we have come in the last 15 years with cloud technologies, I believe. I think vendors realize that these are the beginning innings, and locking customers in right now while still deciding who their vendor is will be a lot easier than trying to do so after they pick a competitor.

However, looking at a cloud-agnostic strategy has its pros and cons. You want to distribute your workload between cloud providers to have competitive pricing and keep open your option like old days. But each cloud has different networking needs, and connecting distributed workloads between clouds to communicate with each other is a complex task. Also, each major cloud provider like AWS, Azure, and GCP has a breadth of services, and building a workforce with all three-skill sets is another charge. Finally, Cloud-like AWS provides you economy of scale, which means the more you use, the price goes down, which may not benefit you if you choose multi-cloud. Again, it doesn’t mean you cannot choose a multi-cloud strategy, but you have to think about logical workload isolation. It will not be wise to run the application layer in one cloud and the database layer in other, but you can think about logical isolation like running the analytics workload and application workload in a separate cloud.A good example of one of those make-or-break decisions is the awarding of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud computing contract by the Pentagon. JEDI is a $10 billion 10-year contract. As big as that dollar figure is, even more important is that it would be nearly impossible for the Pentagon to switch to another vendor once the 10-year contract is up.Let’s delve a little deeper into how influential AWS currently is and how influential it has the potential to become.