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Fuck the Cloud (2009)

ascii.textfiles.com

21–30 of 235 posts

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#21
post #2

This seems unnecessarily angry. I suppose that this person wants to keep his data forever, but many people just don't care that much about their social media photos and the like. I'd love it if Facebook and Twitter had a rolling deletion period option - everything more than six months old is shredded forever, as far as the service is concerned. While people can obviously store shared photos and this wouldn't actually…

> I suppose that this person wants to keep his data forever, but many people just don't care that much about their social media photos and the like. "This person" is Jason Scott, who works as the Internet Archive and also heads up Archive Team (the loose band of internet folks who race to archive sites about to go dark). He's a digital historian; his job is to save everything he can. https://twitter.com/textfiles htt…

This article doesn't really stand on its own; it comes across as a rambling diatribe by someone who is out of touch. If you have to know who the author of an article is to be persuaded by the argument given then it isn't very good. There are much better articles expressing this point of view.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#22

Don't we keep our entire life's savings in companies aka banks that we don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand.

They are much more tightly regulated (legally), and insured, often by governments.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#23
post #12

When everything was "moving to the cloud" a few years ago (around when Jason wrote this), I started to have similar feelings. It all felt like something marketers were over-hyping. "Your computer in the cloud" (ever had a shell account that was your main system? This isn't new), "your games in the cloud! Ever played Nethack using that shell account? I guess the only 'new' thing that I saw was the scaling capabilities…

My mom was a mainframe programmer and says the cloud it is just like what they had 50 years ago with timesharing but a different name. I just smile and nod.

Is such a statement much different than saying PCs are just tiny mainframes with a screens attached?

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#24

Jason's follow up post to this: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4352

tl;dr Renting remote computational power is cool (AWS), but renting remote storage is not.

I have a complete history of email archives since I started using gmail (ie cloud), but have lost years of archives from the years I managed email myself.

It turns out that companies focused on data storage and retrieval do a better job than me. And that's fine. I pay someone to do my taxes and I don't build my own furniture. Specialization is a good thing.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#28

Don't we keep our entire life's savings in companies aka banks that we don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand.

I think most people have more of there savings in stuff than banks. (Clothes, PC, car, House etc.) At scale cash is a proxy for wealth not actual wealth.

PS: A home loan might seem like the bank owns your house, but they can't say no when you sell it.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#29

Don't we keep our entire life's savings in companies aka banks that we don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand.

They are much more tightly regulated (legally), and insured, often by governments.

That's an excellent analogy I hadn't thought of. SLA's between companies is perhaps a proxy in the data world, but nothing for individual users.

When data will become so important/politicized that there will be regulations about data retention?

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#30
Well, that's one way to break the ice :)

I have a bit more of a nuanced view on this than Jason, but I totally understand where he's coming from and when the whole cloud gravy train started rolling our perspectives overlapped much more than they do today (and quite probably since then Jason's perspective has changed as well as perspectives do with the passing of time).

There are use-cases where the cloud is absolutely and utterly the wrong way to go about it. When you're running a bank, a government institution (ever a lower government one) or something else that is mission critical and where total control of the data and maintaining end-user privacy is paramount then the cloud is probably not the right solution.

There are also use-cases where the cloud is the right solution in principle but the wrong solution in practice because of cost. Above a certain scale bandwidth and storage costs of cloud operators will always command a premium over those you get from dedicated hosting providers.

As for 'not owning the machines', plenty of companies lease their servers, so technically they don't own them anyway.

The big problem with 'the cloud' as I see it is that companies tend to rely utterly on it and do not have a 'what if the cloud fails' line in their disaster recovery plans. Lose the cloud data and the company goes up in a puff of water vapor, which is what clouds are made of after all.

So if your use case does match the cloud solutions well then make sure that whatever else you do, have at least a copy of your critical data, code and your configuration information outside of the cloud provider. And while you're at it, make sure that this is done in such a way that there is a separation of duties with respect to those that can administer the cloud portion and those that can access those just-in-case-the-shit-hits-the-fan backups.

Just so you don't end up like codespaces did.

Finally, the cloud is not so much an end-station as it is a step on a much wider scale from absolute control with certain administrative duties on one end and much less control but great convenience on the other. Where on that scale constraints indicated by your comfort level, your application and your fiduciary duties allow you to pick your solution is something that is likely different for every company (and likely for every person).

Customers of companies would do well to research their service providers when it comes to how they are architected, just in case something goes drastically wrong so they don't end up holding the bag.

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