Breaking the Cloud Chains: How RunOS Aims to End Vendor Lock-In with Infrastructure Abstraction

As cloud costs soar and organizations seek greater flexibility, RunOS emerges as a promising solution to the pervasive problem of vendor lock-in. By creating an abstraction layer between applications and hardware, the platform promises to deliver the benefits of modern cloud platforms—managed services, auto-scaling, monitoring—without tying users to a single provider.

The Cloud Lock-In Dilemma

At every tech company, the pattern seems familiar: start with one cloud provider, build an entire infrastructure around its services, and eventually find yourself trapped. Whether it's AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, each offers powerful tools that make development easier—until you want to leave.

"I've watched too many companies get stuck in the same trap," explains the RunOS team. "You start on AWS. Or Google Cloud. Or Azure. Doesn't matter which. They're all great platforms with amazing features. Then you want to experiment. Maybe you need GPUs for a machine learning workload. Maybe you found a cheaper provider for batch processing. Maybe you want servers in a specific region the big clouds don't cover. And suddenly you realize: you're locked in."

The problem lies in how deeply cloud provider APIs and services become integrated into an organization's infrastructure. Moving workloads between providers means rebuilding entire deployment pipelines, monitoring setups, logging infrastructures, and service meshes—a process so daunting that most organizations simply accept the lock-in.

Infrastructure Should Be Like Choosing a Database

"Think about how you choose a database for an application," the RunOS team suggests. "PostgreSQL or MySQL? You pick what works best. Need to switch later? It's not trivial, but it's doable. With the right abstractions in place, switching between databases becomes much simpler. Your infrastructure provider should work the same way."

This analogy highlights a fundamental truth: while application components should be portable, infrastructure has historically been anything but. RunOS aims to change this by providing an abstraction layer that sits between applications and the hardware they run on.

How RunOS Works

RunOS functions as a platform that delivers all the benefits of modern cloud platforms—managed databases, auto-scaling, monitoring, logging, security—while allowing the underlying servers to come from anywhere: AWS, Hetzner, your own hardware, or a mix.

This abstraction enables unprecedented flexibility:

• Run production workloads on AWS for their network speed and reliability
• Run batch processing on Hetzner because it's 70% cheaper
• Spin up GPU instances wherever GPUs are available and affordable
• Test new providers without rebuilding infrastructure
• Mix providers in a single cluster if desired
• Move workloads between providers without changing deployment processes

The vision is clear: same software platform, different hardware underneath, entirely the user's choice.

Managed Services Without the Lock-In

"We're building managed services like RDS and EKS, but without the lock-in," the team explains. "Want a managed PostgreSQL database? Click to install. It runs on whatever servers you point RunOS at. AWS, GCP, Hetzner, your basement server. Doesn't matter. The database is highly available, automatically backed up, monitored, and maintained. Just like RDS. But you own the infrastructure."

This approach extends to other services as well—Redis, Kafka, monitoring tools—providing one-click managed services with the user's choice of hardware.

Enterprise-Grade Features Without Vendor Constraints

Large organizations require features like compliance, security, and audit trails. RunOS is building these capabilities directly into the platform:

• Full audit logs of every change (who installed what, when, why)
• SSO integration for team access
• SOC2 compliance
• Automatic security updates
• Secrets management with auto-rotation
• High availability configurations

These features are designed to give enterprises everything they expect from cloud providers without tying them to a single vendor.

Solving the Hard Problems of Infrastructure Management

"Setting up Kubernetes isn't hard," notes the RunOS team. "What's hard is keeping everything up to date, managing version compatibility between services, configuring high availability correctly, setting up automatic failovers that actually work, managing secrets and rotating credentials, getting monitoring and logging working properly, and making sure backups actually restore when you need them."

RunOS aims to handle these complexities, having already done the hard configuration work, tested failovers, and verified that backups restore correctly. As more users adopt the system, configurations become battle-tested across hundreds of deployments.

Auto-Scaling Across Multiple Providers

The platform's auto-scaling capabilities demonstrate the power of its abstraction layer. Users can define pools of potential providers—AWS for low-latency workloads, Hetzner for batch processing—and RunOS will automatically request new instances based on predefined rules, scaling back down when demand drops.

This approach enables true cost optimization, as users can leverage the strengths of different providers for different workloads without the operational overhead of managing multiple environments.

Multi-Cluster Deployments and Disaster Recovery

Running applications across multiple clusters for geographic redundancy or disaster recovery presents significant challenges. Moving databases between geographically distributed clusters, for example, requires complex automation and testing.

RunOS is building these best practices into the platform, aiming to handle the complexities of multi-cluster deployments so users don't need to figure everything out themselves.

Simplifying Infrastructure as Code

"Defining multi-cluster scenarios with infrastructure as code gets messy fast," the team acknowledges. "The YAML files multiply. The configs get complex. Maintaining it becomes a full-time job."

RunOS plans to abstract this complexity, allowing users to define what they want with minimal IaC code. The platform would then handle the translation into all necessary configurations, YAMLs, and workloads behind the scenes.

Built-In Observability

Every Kubernetes setup requires logging, metrics, and monitoring—typically consuming days or weeks of setup time. RunOS includes these components out of the box, ensuring consistent monitoring regardless of whether servers are running on AWS, Hetzner, or user-owned hardware.

The Future of Flexible Infrastructure

Cloud providers aren't the enemy, the RunOS team emphasizes. "AWS, GCP, Azure are incredible platforms with amazing engineering. But you should have choices. You should be able to use the best tool for each job. You should be able to optimize costs without rebuilding everything. You should be able to experiment with new providers without massive risk."

RunOS aims to provide this flexibility while maintaining all the conveniences of modern cloud platforms. The platform is currently in beta, with plans to continuously add features, improve reliability, and expand its service catalog.

The ultimate goal, as stated by the team, is to make infrastructure "simple enough that developers can manage it themselves, but powerful enough that enterprises can trust it for production workloads—all without vendor lock-in or proprietary services."

As organizations increasingly seek cost optimization and flexibility in their cloud strategies, platforms like RunOS may represent a significant evolution in how we think about and manage infrastructure in the multi-cloud era.