"Koffler says it's not necessarily hard to move data out of S3, it just may be more expensive than putting it in."
This is a ridiculous statement. PUTs are $0.01 for 1,000 requests, and GETs are $0.01 for 10,000. Deletion is free. Data transfer out per GB is comparable to the monthly cost per GB.
Sure, putting data in is cheap because you don't get charged for bandwidth, but storing it costs just as much per month as moving it out would. If you've got somewhere better to store your data than S3, you'll come out ahead price-wise after a single month, so you should do it. That's not lock-in, not even close.
Convenience-wise, yes, there's a lot of lock-in with AWS, no question. But that's a different problem, it's not fair to imply that you're locked in because of charges to actually get your data out.
This is a ridiculous statement. PUTs are $0.01 for 1,000 requests, and GETs are $0.01 for 10,000. Deletion is free. Data transfer out per GB is comparable to the monthly cost per GB.
Sure, putting data in is cheap because you don't get charged for bandwidth, but storing it costs just as much per month as moving it out would. If you've got somewhere better to store your data than S3, you'll come out ahead price-wise after a single month, so you should do it. That's not lock-in, not even close.
Convenience-wise, yes, there's a lot of lock-in with AWS, no question. But that's a different problem, it's not fair to imply that you're locked in because of charges to actually get your data out.