Blog Avoiding Cloud Lock-in Posted on July 5, 2012 by DaveFellows Having recently completed a port to GreenButton's third supported cloud platform (Dell's vCloud), I thought a few words on our motivation and approach to being "cloud-agnostic" would be timely. Meeting with many enterprise CIOs, it's no surprise that one of the major concerns I hear when considering a move to the cloud, is vendor lock in. When we moved from the old Linux-based New Zealand Supercomputer Centre (this was the surplus hardware leftover from production of the Lord of the Rings movies), the ground-up re-architecture of GreenButton was heavily focused on being cloud-agnostic. Whilst we had strong support from Microsoft for proof of concepts and commercial deployments to Windows Azure (and continue to have), it was always our intention to support a number of cloud providers and broker compute resources dynamically to end users, based on price and other factors. Further to this, it is GreenButton's audacious goal to define the standard for how end users access on-demand compute resources in the cloud -- regardless of platform choice. This requires a higher level -- and more open -- view of the world than what a single cloud platform would allow for. If you aren't familiar with GreenButton, we provide a software platform that sits on top of various IaaS (or PaaS) providers to manage compute-intensive workloads (rendering, DNA sequencing, Seismic processing, Financial Modelling, BigData etc). Our focus has always been to make running workloads as easy and seamless as