data gravity

Definitions

1. The principle that large datasets attract applications, services, and additional data to their location, much like physical mass attracts objects through gravity. As data accumulates in one place (e.g., a cloud provider), moving it becomes increasingly impractical due to transfer costs, latency, and integration dependencies — effectively locking you in.

   In plain English: The idea that large amounts of data are hard to move, so applications and services tend to cluster around wherever the data already lives — a major source of cloud vendor lock-in.

   Example: We wanted to switch cloud providers but data gravity won — moving 500TB of data and the 40 services that depend on it would take months and cost a fortune.

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