This is a good example of people making questionable practical decisions based on good principles. Yes, in principle it'd be good if you were agnostic of your cloud provider. But there's a few issues with it. Firstly, you're going to work so much harder doing what you want to do on AWS whilst avoiding doing the things AWS wants you to do. They're not dumb! You don't want to be locked in? They really want you locked in and they're going to work very hard to make that happen. Secondly, the likelihood of you ever actually making the decision to leave is extremely low, so you're paying all these costs for what is at best a theoretically risk. And finally, even if you do everything perfectly and never depend on anything uniquely amazon.... leaving is still going to suck! It's still going to be a huge amount of work to migrate away!