I am in the process of learning ROS and Gazebo for a project and saw that Amazon's Robomaker seems to be a great environment to get something up and working quickly. My concern is if I design and develop my project in Robomaker, that it will be tough to move over to my own servers should the time come.
Has anyone had any experience with this? Is it pretty simple to move over to another solution/infrastructure or are you married to AWS once you go down the rabbit hole?
Do they demand ownership of your IP? Basically, if it is "normal ROS", there's a robot encoded in an URDF file, there's a bunch of standard ROS libraries (gazebo, controller, robot_localization, amcl, etc.), all strung together by a bunch of launch files (aka xml startup scripts). They can't stop you from using this on your own system.
What they really offer, if you look at what they're pitching (https://aws.amazon.com/robomaker/), is a bunch of custom software, chiefly useful for running a fleet/multiple of robots in an industrial setting, involving human interaction / voice, data analytics and monitoring. For most people learning, if you were to even touch this (you can get entirely on your own on a native ubuntu or ubuntu virtualbox), their simulation environment may be nicer out-of-the-box (I haven't played with it). The rest of the benefits, to translate them, is to have robots with data analytics and fancy AI+web tools, and then to do fleet lifecycle management. You are most certainly not locked in - just make sure you want what they offer before shelling out anything.