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Lew Moorman, President of Rackspace. Share your thoughts on lock-in, OpenStack and more in the comments section below.

Heres a question. What if your computing needs outgrow the horsepower and features of your current stable of PCs and servers? Simple. You go buy better ones. Maybe try a different brand.And if you hate the new ones? No problem. Simply try another option.Or go back to the original. You always have a choice with hardware.

That, however, was yesterday. Today, companies of all sizes are getting themselves out of the hardware business and instead are buying their computing as a service, in the cloud. Trouble is, the freedom of choice and portability that youve enjoyed when purchasing computer hardware has been largely absent when youre buying cloud services.

To see what I mean, consider movie rentals: a business revolutionized by cloud computing. Remember just a few years ago when you had to drive to Blockbuster and hope the movie you wanted wasnt already checked out? Now, the cloud has enabled a growing list of services like Netflix, which allow us to stream any movie onto any device with the click of a button.Todays cloud gives movie buffs unlimited choice and freedom. But is it giving businesses that same kind of choice and freedom?

Listen to what Adrian Cockcroft, Netflixs Director of Architecture, is saying about his cloud provider, Amazon Web Services. He loves it. And yet, he too wants choice. Please try to build AWS clones that scale! he asks.

Why is he saying this? Through no fault of Netflix, its business is deeply integrated into the Amazon cloud, with long-term implications for costs and capabilities. Like Amazon, Netflix is a pioneer, and at the time when it decided to move its business to the cloud, there was no open cloud platform available. All the cloud providers used proprietary software. My question is: if Netflix wanted to move, could it? How hard would it be? As for many who are using the full power of the cloud offerings of today, I think the answer is clear: moving would be very hard.

Heres why: the cloud is a very different model for running applications, as compared to traditional infrastructure. Your applications dont ride on top of the infrastructure like a jockey on a horse. Instead, those apps fuse to the cloud infrastructure, like the riders of the banshees in Avatar, who join for life with their flying beasts. This integration is central to the power of cloud computing: its nimbleness and speed; its automation and scaling. In traditional computing, when a company needs more servers to run its application, an operations technician has to ask for them. In the cloud, the application is capable of making these decisions automatically based on its needs and the cloud responds accordingly.

But heres the catch: Once your applications are integrated into the infrastructure of a proprietary cloud, switching providers becomes much harder. It requires at least some recoding of your application.

Furthermore, once your apps are fused into a proprietary cloud, there is a strong temptation to use its proprietary features. Amazon has innovated rapidly in this area, offering cool but proprietary products such as SimpleDB and DynamoDB that simply have no implementation outside its cloud. Once the customer uses such features, their applications are fully fused into that one stack.

To update an old computing metaphor: you date your hardware provider; you marry your cloud.

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Is There Any Choice in the Cloud?