Vendor Lock-In Happens Through Networking — Not APIs

Welcome to Part 3 of the **Cloud Fragility * series. In Part 2, we exposed how Identity acts as a single point of failure. Today, we tackle the financial physics of the cloud: why your data is stuck, even if your code is portable.* The Great API Distraction For the past fifteen years, we obsessed over the wrong kind of lock-in. Everyone worried: “If I use DynamoDB or Azure Functions, am I trapping my code forever?” So, we poured billions of hours and dollars into building abstraction layers, adopting Kubernetes, and patching together generic Terraform providers—all just to keep our compute “portable.” We pretty much won that battle. Now, containers run anywhere you want. Moving code isn’t that hard. But while we were busy making our compute portable, the cloud giants were quietly making our data immovable. These days, real vendor lock-in isn’t about APIs at all. It comes down to physics and money —the mass of your data and the toll roads built to keep it parked right where it is. The P