Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fuck the Cloud (2009)

ascii.textfiles.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 235 posts

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#51

Post by nsfyn55 »

xenophonf wrote: post #40
nsfyn55 wrote: post #34

>Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of. I don't understand this logic. Amazon's S3 offers service level agreements with failure rates that at one point implied the statistical likelihood of losing an object to be once in "thousands of years". When dealing with any sort of stable storage this is simply something I cannot offer. I couldn't produce a set up locally with the resources…

I think you missed the point. S3 isn't free. You pay for that service: and if you’re a person they are giving it to you without you signing anything accompanied by cash or payment that says “and I mean it“.

Are you talking to me? I never said it was free. No storage solution is free.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#52

Post by nickpsecurity »

nsfyn55 wrote: post #34

>Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of. I don't understand this logic. Amazon's S3 offers service level agreements with failure rates that at one point implied the statistical likelihood of losing an object to be once in "thousands of years". When dealing with any sort of stable storage this is simply something I cannot offer. I couldn't produce a set up locally with the resources…

We've been doing it for a long time. It's called some reliable servers in multiple locations with copies of the same data plus some offline backups (esp tape). There's many non-technical, Fortune 500 companies whose data has lasted longer than Amazon's existence. Cheapest version of this involves two high-capacity boxes at two locations each with maybe a colo agreement. Let's you keep replacing stuff as servers and drives fail. I've even done it with embedded boxes (VIA Artigo's) in the past where data volume wasn't high.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#53

Post by Spooky23 »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #31
alphadevx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The reason they are is because of their intrinsic propensity to destabilization, vis-a-vis Minsky and the Financial Instability Hypothesis. Of course, how you structure your regulatory framework can have adverse consequences, as well (i.e. implicit guarantees by GSEs on mortgage-backed securities). It is further arguable whether or not fractional reserve exacerbates these effects.

I was just talking to my pals at Digital Equipment Corporation and Sun Microsystems about how stable the technology industry is.

Then, I read an article in Google Reader discussing how we don't even have to worry about arbitrary and capricious market behavior from our cloud partners, since we all have long term contracts and are protected against upward price swings from our cloud partners or material changes to the services they deliver.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#54

Post by geocar »

83457 wrote: post #23
tibbon wrote: 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?

Providing an employee with equipment (such as a laptop personal computer) to do their job is (legally) different than leasing equipment to a contractor, or transfer-pricing between departments in a corporation.

Remember that a timeshare was very expensive and that those costs were accounted for carefully not only for the purposes of internal billing but also for benefit-analysis.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#56

Post by nsfyn55 »

pjc50 wrote: post #43
nsfyn55 wrote: post #34

>Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of. I don't understand this logic. Amazon's S3 offers service level agreements with failure rates that at one point implied the statistical likelihood of losing an object to be once in "thousands of years". When dealing with any sort of stable storage this is simply something I cannot offer. I couldn't produce a set up locally with the resources…

S3 seems great today, and is undoubtedly more technically reliable than any home solution, but history is littered with companies that closed down on very short notice leaving their users' data deleted or inaccessible. Not to mention that billing disputes or legal action could also affect your ability to get data from them. (Jason Scott is speaking from experience here, as one of the people called in to do emergency…

Yeah but once again this problem is statistical in nature. Admittedly the cloud isn't perfect but the question remains. Does the "Counter Party" risk outweigh the chances that my home spun solution would fail? Since the likelihood of failure on my part is orders of magnitude higher then the "counter party" risk would have to be huge, like really enormous. e.g Amazon would constantly have to be on the brink of imminent collapse. This is not the case.

If Amazon went out of business there is no chance at this point that the loss would be total and catastrophic. Its essentially a bank at this point. Its shutdown would be orderly.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#57

Post by [deleted] »

pjc50 wrote: post #43
nsfyn55 wrote: post #34

>Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of. I don't understand this logic. Amazon's S3 offers service level agreements with failure rates that at one point implied the statistical likelihood of losing an object to be once in "thousands of years". When dealing with any sort of stable storage this is simply something I cannot offer. I couldn't produce a set up locally with the resources…

S3 seems great today, and is undoubtedly more technically reliable than any home solution, but history is littered with companies that closed down on very short notice leaving their users' data deleted or inaccessible. Not to mention that billing disputes or legal action could also affect your ability to get data from them. (Jason Scott is speaking from experience here, as one of the people called in to do emergency…

[deleted]

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#58

Post by tillinghast »

LinuxBender wrote: post #25
bradleyankrom wrote: post #7

This article is a lot of fun with the Cloud To Butt Chrome plugin installed.

That is by far my favorite plugin. Just don't forget to turn it off before presenting in a meeting...

… or before you make that quick-just-this-once edit to your site's templates via the CMS's wysiwyg editor. Turns out buttfront.net references don't resolve where you think they do.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#59

Post by limaoscarjuliet »

nsfyn55 wrote: post #34

>Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of. I don't understand this logic. Amazon's S3 offers service level agreements with failure rates that at one point implied the statistical likelihood of losing an object to be once in "thousands of years". When dealing with any sort of stable storage this is simply something I cannot offer. I couldn't produce a set up locally with the resources…

This is the perfect point of the article - use the cloud (hey, it's "free") but KEEP A COPY. Otherwise you will get boned one day!

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#60

Post by peterwwillis »

If you use Snapchat a lot, you may notice how often you get updates from people or see their public story change. Do you ever stop to think about the old snaps, or miss them? No, because you have a constant stream of new ones. You can always make more memories.

Nothing about the cloud is that different from what we had before. With shared hosting providers, you and 50 other users would fill up your disk quota on one or two hard drives on some dinky 1U server running Apache and ProFTPD. If the drives died, along with it went your data. Which is why you kept a copy on your own computer. Back then, nobody expected anyone to keep their data for them, so they just kept their own backups. The same was true for managed services and colo with the exception that you had to do more of the work yourself.

Because the industry has gotten better about preventing data loss, we get complacent and stop saving our stuff as much. But why piss and moan over more reliable, more massive services for cheap or free? Because it isn't perfect, or innovative, or more transparent?

The status quo of the industry is to reinvent the wheel, so it's hard to get mad at people for re-packaging the same solution in a different container. The obsession of holding onto all your old stuff just makes this look even more unnecessary.

Post reply on HN