Welcome

Dear Reader,

The term "vendor lock-in" has been in common parlance for as long as I've been working on this magazine. The term, which became popular during the imperial Microsoft era as a way of calling out monopolistic practices of Microsoft and other vendors, refers to the tendency of powerful companies to trap users on their platforms by denying them the tools and interfaces they need to interoperate with other platforms. We associate the practice with Microsoft, but the Redmond FUD slingers stood on the shoulders of a giant called IBM, perhaps the biggest lock-in artist in the storied history of the computer industry. We don't talk about vendor lock-in as much as we used to, but everyone knows it is still out there, operating in evermore subtle ways to take choice away from users.

As a Linux journalist, it is my role to call out bad cases of vendor lock-in. On the other hand, if I see big companies acting in a way that promotes interoperability and open systems, I believe that deserves some mention also. I was interested to see that Amazon and Google recently announced a new API that will make it easier to interconnect their cloud environments. The new Connection Coordinator API forms a link from Amazon's Interconnect – multicloud to Google's Cross-Cloud Interconnect to enable users to "…establish private, high-speed connectivity between Google Cloud and AWS with high levels of automation and speed." The interface, which abstracts the physical connections between the vendors, appears to offer something like a wormhole between the Amazon universe and the Google universe.

Previous technologies allowed the customer to build a bridge between the platforms, but it required a custom solution that could take weeks to develop and implement. According to the press announcement, "Customers no longer need to wait weeks for circuit provisioning: they can now provision dedicated bandwidth on demand and establish connectivity in minutes through their preferred cloud console or API." Apparently, this open API is also available to other cloud vendors, which could promote additional interconnectivity throughout the cloud space.

The good thing about open systems is that they isolate those who are still clinging to closed systems. The one big cloud vendor left out of this announcement in Microsoft Azure. Tools like Google's Cross-Cloud can connect to Azure now using the conventional method – by provisioning ports – but the pressure will now be on Azure to join in the collaboration or at least support the API that will allow users to join in.

It was no coincidence that this announcement was less than six weeks after Amazon's catastrophic crash of October 20, which brought down thousands of websites around the world and caused more than $500 million in lost revenue. Big cloud customers know a multi-cloud environment is their best protection from the crash of a single vendor. The cloud industry has never been as controlling as old-school tyrants like IBM and Balmer-era Microsoft. Still, it is good to see market pressures leading to more, and not less, connectivity.

Joe Casad, Editor in Chief