Vendor Lock-In

CATALOG ENTRY

Also known as: Product-Dependent Architecture, Bondage and Submission, Connector Conspiracy.

Vendor Lock-In shows up in systems that quietly become dependent on one supplier's proprietary approach, often with the vendor's active encouragement. The name Pottersville comes from the film It's a Wonderful Life: the alternate reality where one uncontested interest reshapes everything around it.

Greetings from Pottersville

"Our architecture is the vendor's database." "Our architecture is CORBA." Or, after an upgrade: "When I try to read the new data files into the old version of the application, it crashes my system." "Once you read data into the new application, you can never get it out again."

The project's architecture and the vendor's product become the same thing. That's fine until the vendor changes direction, raises the price, or gets acquired, and the project has no isolation layer between its own logic and someone else's roadmap.

Refactored Solution

The Isolation Layer

An isolation layer, an architectural boundary that keeps vendor-specific interfaces on one side and the rest of the system on the other, gives the project a real choice later. Without one, migration away from a vendor costs roughly what building the system cost the first time.

Specification

Also Known As
Product-Dependent Architecture, Bondage and Submission, Connector Conspiracy

Most Frequent Scale
System

Root Causes
Sloth, Apathy, Pride/Ignorance (Gullibility)

Unbalanced Forces
Management of Technology Transfer, Management of Change

Refactored Solution
Isolation Layer

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