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Fuck the Cloud (2009)

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Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#181

Post by derefr »

bingofuel wrote: post #79
wanderingstan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. S…

The tax accountant analogy goes pretty well with this: The accountant is specialized in doing your taxes (aka serving up your data/files) but you still need to keep a copy of your tax records, receipts, and etc.

And so, ideally, I want to be able to tell my accountant to store my archival tax records in my safe-deposit box, not in his office. Compute infrastructure is a commodity—doesn't matter who's paying for it—but all the services you depend on should rely on storage infrastructure you have an SLA agreement with.

I don't care about the "distributed computation" promises of Diaspora or Sandstorm.io; I think they're wrongheaded. Anyone can do compute. But I really do hope that one day that my Facebook account can be canonically "stored on" a database instance I'm paying for, that Facebook's app servers will reach out and connect to and treat as the canonical source for "me", treating their own records as a secondary cache. This kind of setup would makes all sorts of things simpler and clearer and more secure; there would be a definite boundary where "my data" stops (the DB I own) and "Facebook's data" starts (the DBs they own.)

And, to be clear, I'm not talking about everybody running their own infrastructure, or even everybody knowing what an IaaS provider is. Ideally, PaaS providers could get into the "consumer instances" game the way Dropbox is in the "consumer files" game. My "Facebook account database" above could be transparently launched into my own cute little private cloud by my PaaS provider when Facebook requests it through some OAuth-like pairing API. I wouldn't need to think of myself, as a user, as "owning cloud database instances." From my perspective, I'd get an abstract "Facebook account" (which is actually an app instance and attached DBs) sitting in my Heroku-for-consumers account. The important bit is that I'd be paying for the resources that "account" object consumes, that I'd have an SLA on those resources, and that the PaaS company would have every incentive to make it easy for other third-party services to interact with my "Facebook database" in a way Facebook themselves aren't. I, as a user, have no need to "manage" a cloud of my own; I just need to be considered to own it.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#182

Post by Retric »

dragonwriter wrote: post #147
Retric wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> PS: A home loan might seem like the bank owns your house, but they can't say no when you sell it. They can, unless you satisfy the loan by paying it off as part of the process, at which point they no longer have an ownership-like interest. In the unusual cases where you try to sell a house without doing that, the bank absolutely can -- and often will -- say no.

If you have the cash to pay them off, then they don't get to say no even if it's a short sale.

Alternatively, you can generally walk away and sell it to them for the value of the loan.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#183

Post by nickpp »

rodionos wrote: post #47

AWS customer since 2007. Just pulled the plug on our last EC2 instance this week having migrated our stuff to a provider offering root servers for the cost of m3.medium. Our requirements are simple and we have no need for high-load/high-end layers. We used to have 50-100 VMs depending on the time of the day, now less than 20 with the rest of the workloads migrated to Docker containers. P.S. Can't delete Glacier Vault…

Which provider did you go to?

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#184

Post by jacquesm »

dang wrote: post #178
nsfyn55 wrote: post #145

I don't think you are my bro. And I want to be clear your moded and nonsensical jabbering is not why you are a piece of shit. An attempt to call attention to my potential customers in a forum because you disagree with me is why you are a piece of shit. So its cleared up me "offering nothing but objective fact, statistical argument, and well formed conjecture" you "anecdotes, personal attacks, and general butt hurtine…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10772408 and marked it off-topic.

Thanks.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#185

Post by whichfawkes »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #103

I understand why people are upset about the word. It's misused. But I remember what it was like before "the cloud"... You had to provision machines one by one, often via email or phone. It took hours or days. Billing was usually done by the day. It sucked. Now you can just send a POST request to a machine and in a few seconds you have access to a new instance. You can send 1000 requests and get access to 1000 instanc…

Agreed. When I read the title, I was thinking "Oh, so you'd prefer to pay for dedicated servers? What a pain!".

Though, I don't think the author is upset about the word. He's just warning against services that fall within his definition of "cloud" - which is pretty fair. Losing your stuff is no good, and there's always cruddy services out there.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#186

Post by chockablock »

wanderingstan wrote: post #24
swampthinker wrote: post #5

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. S…

(OT) if you still have your archives you can get Gmail to ingest it (over POP), for retroactive 'cloudiness'. My Gmail archive goes back many years before there was a Gmail.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#187

Post by FussyZeus »

rietta wrote: post #8

While Jason Scott raises interesting points six years ago, the principles of data management remain the same as the days of dedicated servers with on premises systems. If you have only one copy of data and that machine goes down, then the data goes with it. In my experience in a business context 'the cloud' discussion is about the business' desire to expand capacity without the need for the capital expenditure needed…

That's what the author is getting at, "The Cloud" is sold as this awesome thing that will never die or break, and worse yet it's sold to people who often don't know any better.

No one realizes that the Cloud is running on the same crap we've always had and is vulnerable to the same issues as everything else. MAYBE the company is better at data management, MAYBE the employees take pride in their job and do it properly, but that's all MAYBE MAYBE MAYBE, and could just as well be "no" and you're entrusting your data to people who really have nothing to lose if it goes into the garbage tomorrow.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#188

Post by matthewmcg »

Domenic_S wrote: post #89
skwirl wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was more on the quality of the article. The article's point is a valid one, if you can find it. To constructively disagree, though: I keep backups. I have a Synology NAS device that I really like. But for your average person, I have to wonder - are their digital photos really safer on their laptop than they are on Facebook? Facebook is a fairly stable company. Laptops are lost, stolen, and damaged all the ti…

Think about the future too though. Facebook strips exif and may have resized/recompressed your images. 20 years from now when we can do more super cool things with that data, the data won't exist in your FB photos. Tangentially related, this is why I shoot RAW. Not because it might give me better pictures today, but because it WILL give me better pictures in 5-10-20 years. You can take a RAW today that was shot 5 yea…

Ideally, you'd want to keep RAW + JPEG. I'd be worried about reading some of the more obscure camera RAW formats in the far future. JPEG seems like a good backup (at the cost of the data loss you mentioned).

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#189

Post by jacquesm »

ciupicri wrote: post #159
tremon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our life's savings are not unique, and can be replenished from a different source. Our childhood pictures and personal correspondence are, and generally can not. Besides, banks are subject to rather a lot of external control, through regulation (oh noes!). Here in NL the government actually guarantees your savings (but not investments) should a bank go belly-up. I believe the US did something similar, although I didn…

By the way, as far as I know all the banks from the European Union guarantees savings up to 50,000 euros, some even more. And if you have more money, you can split them between multiple banks.

NL 100K euros.

http://www.dnb.nl/over-dnb/de-consument-en-dnb/de-consument-...

Subject to some fine print so it can take some work to get your accounts set up in such a way that you would qualify.

Bank mergers are a risk to be aware of here.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#190

Post by Jedd »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #103

I understand why people are upset about the word. It's misused. But I remember what it was like before "the cloud"... You had to provision machines one by one, often via email or phone. It took hours or days. Billing was usually done by the day. It sucked. Now you can just send a POST request to a machine and in a few seconds you have access to a new instance. You can send 1000 requests and get access to 1000 instanc…

> That's what it has always meant to me.

And that's my biggest problem with the word, and why I go to some lengths to avoid using it when talking to clients, despite a number of my employer's (and their partners') products including 'cloud' in their actual name.

No two people actually agree on what the c-word actually means. For you it's elastic compute. For others it's cheap storage, or geographical diversity, or managed RAID, or an ersatz CDN, or their hosted email or wiki or some other application, or an accounting convenience (dipping into the opex, rather than the capex, bucket), or, of course, some combination of those and others.

The biggest problems I've dealt with in IT over the years stem from people having even slightly different ideas of what words mean -- so a word that involves wildly different understandings is not a recipe for tranquillity.

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