There’s an argument that, thanks to the cloud, the bad old days of vendor lock-in are behind us. In a world that’s fully software-defined, what does it matter if you’re on AWS or Azure or your particular provider of choice?

Yet the choice of cloud provider does matter. To take advantage of the unique or most up-to-date features that a vendor offers – particularly around machine learning and AI – you’ll need to invest in the skills required for a particular ecosystem, and use code that is not easily portable to another provider.