Avoiding Vendor lock-in to harness all the potential of your code

As companies continue to grow, all of their processes become more and more complex and need to be executed as quickly as possible to increase their productivity and revenue (that's the raw truth). Time reduction is a challenge that many growing technologies, such as low-code development or IDEs, have to deal with every day.

But why are companies still reluctant to incorporate this type of tool into their day-to-day activities? Well, some of the reasons may be the lack of knowledge on how to use them. They may also think that these solutions lack flexibility.Their security also raises some doubts, as well as their potential scalability.

Today we are going to talk about another one, the vendor lock-in

¿What is Vendor lock-in?

One of the main fears that discourage organizations from adopting new technologies such as low-code apps, IDEs and other Saas platforms to code their processes is the vendor lock-in.

‍Vendor lock-in refers to a situation where the customer is dependent on a single vendor and remains stuck to it due to the high costs of switching to a different vendor. These costs can be not only economic but also technological.

For example, think of SIM cards that only work with one carrier. Switching between companies is difficult for customers in many cases. Another example can be capsulecoffee machines. If you want to change the coffee or the company changes the design of the capsules, you will have to change the machine with the cost that this entails.

Main risks and consequences of Lock-in

A closed, proprietary and inflexible solution usually implies the loss of control by the client, over data, infrastructure and security. Relying on a single vendor may be risky when we have a critical response, availability, or security needs. Because that implies blindly trusting the vendor, a relationship that takes time to build.

In case of a critical failure, a strong dependence on a single provider can harm us and leave us without alternatives to be able to react. Needless to say, the high cost that this can imply.

Vendor lock-in can become an issue in cloud computing because it may be very difficult to move large volumes of data between databases once they are set up. Especially in migrations, where we need to move data to an entirely different type of environment, this may involve reformatting that data.

Another potential danger is the business decisions that the company may adopt, such as price increases, changes in offerings or a decrease in the quality of the service to seek lower prices. In those cases, the client will not have bargaining power and will remain tied to the company.

How YepCode avoid Vendor Lock-in?

As developers, we are fond of Clean-code and the Open-data philosophy. We like that our users use our platform, find the value that YepCode can bring to their team and in their daily work by themselves and not be tied down.

As you may find in ourDocs platform, to implement a process in YepCode you need to write JavaScript code (using NodeJS as execution engine). The platformallows you tosave and export the generated code, so if at any time you prefer not to use our execution environment but to configure a new server from scratch and execute the code there, you can do so. However,all the hypervitaminized functionalities that we provide would not be available(credential storage, webhooks, tunneling, integrations, speed, power and versatility)...

This, in principle, can be counterproductive for us, but we are sure of the value that YepCode can bring to our users.

Happy coding!