The Cloud is a rip off - i Engineered AWS as a sub-contractor for Amazon.
Fuck the Cloud (2009)
61–70 of 235 posts
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#62>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…
> history is littered with companies that closed down on very short notice leaving their users' data deleted or inaccessible
That's absurdly unlikely to happen with S3.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#63>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…
Until your control panel gets hacked and you lose all your data. See: codespaces.com (assuming it wasn't an inside job or a dumb mistake, but even then the same rules apply). So no, DON'T BLOW ANYTHING INTO THE CLOUD THAT YOU DON'T HAVE A COPY OF. It has nothing to do with 'not invented here', it has everything to do with your inability to outsource your responsibilities. The degree to which people rely on others to…
What's the relative risk that my specific control panel will get hacked and I, specifically, will lose all my data, vs. the risk that data on my local store will be compromised by a virus on my computer encrypting my whole hard drive and refusing to let go until I send XYZ bitcoins to a specific address?
There's risks and then there's risks. As always, you can spend some time and money to mitigate some risk, and decide some risk is low enough that you don't care to mitigate it. I wouldn't just assume one risk vector is higher than another without some concrete numbers.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
He's saying that the article does not apply for S3 and other paid services.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#65>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!
Might as well just change "use the cloud" to "use a computer".
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#66>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 argue frequently that the cloud causes cognitive dissonance. People want the ease of use and reliability of centralized outsourced services, but other people want data privacy guarantee and control of those services. If anything is a threat to one or the other, it's the fact we fail to understand the various requirements from distinctly different use cases.
These polarized "requirements" are usually rationalized away by each group. As a data privacy advocate, I believe that I can provide a reliable storage solution to my company without using a centralized cloud service, which then guarantees my privacy because "I'm in control". As an advocate of centralized cloud services, such as Amazon, I present that their team is better at security and reliability than any other team on the planet and that I can encrypt something and trust that my key management is secure. Both of these arguments have fallacies and assumptions.
The solution is to challenge ourselves to build better solutions. At what point in time did technology advancement ever slow down? At what point will we ever stop and say "Y'all, this here compute system is good enough and should be centralized/decentralized!"? Never, I say.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#67This 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 editing Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cloud_seeding#Vandalism
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I see the sarc tag, but if you had a long-term contract with Reader it'd probably have been a different story.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until your control panel gets hacked and you lose all your data. See: codespaces.com (assuming it wasn't an inside job or a dumb mistake, but even then the same rules apply). So no, DON'T BLOW ANYTHING INTO THE CLOUD THAT YOU DON'T HAVE A COPY OF. It has nothing to do with 'not invented here', it has everything to do with your inability to outsource your responsibilities. The degree to which people rely on others to…
> Until your control panel gets hacked and you lose all your data This is just alarmism. If you really wanted to demonstrate your point you would show me some data. The data would demonstrate that over the millions and millions of users on a number of cloud platforms that their rates of data loss are significantly higher than your "home spun" storage. Then you would take out the outliers and show an honest distributi…
> demonstrate that ... on a number of cloud platforms ... that their rates of data loss are significantly higher than your "home spun" storage
You seem to be missing the point.
People are not saying "don't use cloud storage at all"
They are saying "don't use cloud storage exclusively"
You might trust that your cloud providers will never be hacked, that your individual account on them will never be hacked, that they will never suffer a catastrophic failure, that they will never go out of business, that they will never be fully or intermittently down at the moment you need to retrieve some data, and so on and so forth, based on their claims and documentation, or that you won't cock up at some point and cause data loss in your account, but I prefer to have my own copy (or copies) as well as the ones that are "in the cloud". For truly essential data at least one of those copies is both offline and offsite.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#70This is an old article and is almost entirely op-ed. No idea how this got to the top of page on HN. :/
Maybe because opinions are also valid intellectually? Mere data driven conclusions get nowhere without a point of view and an end goal to accompany them.
These statements are true, but may not be reflective of why this story gets top billing on Hacker News. See techdragon's extrapolation comment that's a sibling to this one. ;)
Place smells more and more like Slashdot every month.