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It’s not that hard to have a caching strategy. And then your native app feels like a native app.
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What's wrong with hosting software locally and buying 3rd-party support for the stuff that's "not core competency"? It eliminates a single point of failure.
>What’s wrong with hosting software locally ....it eliminates a single point of failure . I’ll let that just sit there. But you are going to host your own project management software? Your own expense reporting software? Your own email server? Your own payroll processing? Salesforce equivalent? Your own git server? Dropbox equivalent?
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What do you propose? That every company reinvent the wheel or host everything locally even if it’s not their core competency? Every company has to decide what its “unfair advantage” is and concentrate on that.
What's wrong with hosting software locally and buying 3rd-party support for the stuff that's "not core competency"? It eliminates a single point of failure.
When Netflix previously owned and managed their own datacenters, they had a massive 3-day database outage[1] that disrupted shipping DVDs to customers. Even though they are a Silicon Valley tech company and built their own datacenter competency with internal staff engineers, it didn't prevent that major failure.
Based on interviews with Reed Hastings and Adrian Cockcroft, they said the 2 big reasons they migrated to AWS was (1) the pain of that 3-day outage and (2) the future expansion plans into international regions. They didn't want to buy more datacenters and manage that extra complexity. Reed said, "they wanted to get out of the datacenter business".
Yes, AWS/GCP/Azure all have outages too but Netflix (and other customers) conclude that -- as a whole -- those cloud vendors will be more reliable than in-house solutions. The cloud vendors also iterate on new features faster than in-house staff -- especially for non-tech companies like The Guardian newspaper.[2]
Some big companies such as Facebook, Walmart, can employ an army of IT staff with the skills to maintain complex "private clouds". However, most non-tech companies found out that internal clouds were an inefficient way to spend money on IT because it wasn't their core competency. Just because a raw racked server installed on-premise is cheaper than EC2 doesn't mean the TCO (Total Cost Ownership) is cheaper.
[1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-net...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160319022029/https://www.compu...
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>What’s wrong with hosting software locally ....it eliminates a single point of failure . I’ll let that just sit there. But you are going to host your own project management software? Your own expense reporting software? Your own email server? Your own payroll processing? Salesforce equivalent? Your own git server? Dropbox equivalent?
Why not?
B) would it have the same reliability characteristics?
C) do you have a DR strategy?
D) after you spend all that money, did it help you either save money or make money? Did it give you a competitive advantage? Did it help you go to market faster?
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And now with GDPR I have an annoying “we use cookies” splash page every time I visit a web page. Win???
Those are not actually compliant with the regulation - it explicitly forbids annoying/confusing/forced consent prompts. There is a problem with the lack of enforcement, but the regulation itself is sane.
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The opposite of depending on another company to host a service is to host it yourself. The average company of any size has at least a dozen external SAAS dependencies. Do you want to have the expense of managing all of those services yourself?
That's the easy part.
It depends on what you want but managing complex software may be expensive and has some serious economies of scale, which makes a pressure to outsource, even expensively. You can't just brush it off with 'that's easy', it's not.
I get the tradeoffs. I'm not going back 10+ years.
This is the 3rd time in a week a "Local-First software" overview has been submitted and the 2nd time it's made the front page here. I'm pretty surprised about that because I'm about to release a local-first, offline-first, option for an app I make. This article also quickly moves past "local-first" software to conflict resolution which, in my opinion, is a distinctly different issue. It's certainly not reason enough…
Do you have a website where you talk about your stuff? I didn't see anything listed in your profile.
And I outline the features on the new site for the app at https://cherrypc.com/home.html
That site is still under construction but there is a link to a demo of the app there. It doesn't run on a local CouchDB though, it uses the browser's IndexedDB.
You only change one line of code to use the IndexedDB, the cloud based CouchDB, or the locally installed CouchDB.
I did make a very simple demo of a "Rich Text Editor" app that runs on a CouchDB installed on your desktop pc though. After you've installed CouchDB and created an "Admin User" and password this page configures a user and a DB on your CouchDB:
https://cherrypc.com/app/editor/setup.html
After you created your user you're redirected to the app and prompted to login at this page:
https://cherrypc.com/app/editor/index.html
After you log in you can CRUD & print rich text documents.
It's a very simple app and all the code to make it is included in the source of those two html pages.
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>What’s wrong with hosting software locally ....it eliminates a single point of failure . I’ll let that just sit there. But you are going to host your own project management software? Your own expense reporting software? Your own email server? Your own payroll processing? Salesforce equivalent? Your own git server? Dropbox equivalent?
Why not?
Longer answer: doing things in-house that are outside your core competencies and/or value creation model is a poor use of scarce resources (both capital and human—predominantly management bandwidth) and increases risk carried.
To give a concrete example: imagine you need to host your source code repository. You can pay for something like Bitbucket for $6/month/user and not have to worry about it. It’s a price that scales linearly with your team size and is a tiny fraction of their total cost.
Doing it in-house: you have to pay for hardware, storage, worry about backups, have somebody support it, have somebody manage the person that supports it, deal with users, find a solution to remote access, and so on. But all these miss the big cost—risk—what happens if the server dies or your office burns down? Nobody used to get fired for buying IBM, nobody now gets fired for buying a popular SaaS product.
You aren’t Google, at some point scale changes the equation, but that’s a rare spot to be in.
I'll take cloud first thanks. No software to update. Nothing to backup. I just open a computer/phone/tablet and access my stuff. I get the tradeoffs. I'm not going back 10+ years.