Vendor Lock-in Issues for Infrastructure or Platform "As a Service"

It's an understandable concern enterprises may have about "infrastructure as a service" compared to "platform as a service." It is one thing to rent storage or compute cycles, another thing to rent the "middleware" elements as well.

Amazon'es "Elastic Beanstalk" is an example of the platform approach, and includes handling of deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

At the same time, with Elastic Beanstalk, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time.

Elastic Beanstalk leverages Amazon Web Serves applications and features such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Notification Service, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto-Scaling to deliver the same highly reliable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure that hundreds of thousands of businesses depend on today.

Small businesses that are not specifically app developers and providers, on the other hand, will not have such concerns, in most cases. To some extent, they will buy turned-up services supplied by firms that already have had to make those decisions.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk