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Local-first software (2019)

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Re: Local-first software (2019)

#71

Post by kortilla »

jasode wrote: post #41
elmo2you wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many far smarter people have said this before, far more eloquently than I can, but in short: Cloud Computing (and SASS even more so) is little more than just another attempt to recreate access/info monopolies, essentially the same profit proposition as existed with closed source software, while pretending to be one of the cool kids and use politically more acceptable (but in this context rather meaningless) terms lik…

>Cloud Computing (and SASS even more so) is little more than just another attempt to recreate access/info monopolies, [...] , everyone will blame anything and everything but their own willful ignorance, For some reason, "cloud computing" has become a bogeyman and therefore corporations paying for it are clueless "sheeple". To help prevent the phrase "cloud computing" from distorting our thinking, we have to remember…

None of your examples would disrupt the core business from functioning (barring the huge reduction in reservations from SABRE but that’s a monopoly exchange, which is a different problem).

Disrupting paychecks, retirement, healthcare, stock issuance, etc were all annoying but the business would not cease to make money and those were all relatively interchangeable with other providers or had offline alternatives.

The key difference with this current cloud embrace is that big billion dollar businesses are making their core business dependent on Amazon/Google/Microsoft cloud services. They don’t even trust power companies or ISPs to give them power and Internet that reliably.

A disaster recovery plan for a dependence on AWS lambda and co. is now just “Amazon shouldn’t fail, but if it does we’ll just have to rewrite all of that software at great expense and lost revenue to the business.”

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#72

Post by rzzzt »

oblib wrote: post #43

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…

Unhosted.org [1] mentions the remoteStorage protocol [2] as one of the options for storing user data separate from an application.

[1] https://unhosted.org/adventures/7/Adding-remote-storage-to-u...

[2] https://remotestorage.io/

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#73

Post by mynegation »

scarface74 wrote: post #42
AriaMinaei wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are jumping to the "What do you propose?" question before understanding the pain point first. You are asking for a solution before agreeing that there exists a problem. This is the "I'll listen to your problem if the solution is convenient" mentality. It's inside-the-box thinking. It holds you back.

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?

Anecdote, but here is a specific situation. Company X has both internal cloud (based on OpenShift) and “public” cloud (Y: one of the big three cloud providers). Application team Z has applications on both, for historical reasons. One of these days application on the internal cloud fails, remediation requires attention from X’s infrastructure team (which is not the same and quite removed from application team), situation is dragging for hours initially and repercussions are cleaned up for several days afterwards. Business is losing money and is furious. Similar situations happens on a public cloud, application team gets a tech resource from Y calling back in two minutes and the whole situation is resolved in two hours.

The immediate costs are only part of the picture.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#75

Post by jasode »

kortilla wrote: post #71
jasode wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Cloud Computing (and SASS even more so) is little more than just another attempt to recreate access/info monopolies, [...] , everyone will blame anything and everything but their own willful ignorance, For some reason, "cloud computing" has become a bogeyman and therefore corporations paying for it are clueless "sheeple". To help prevent the phrase "cloud computing" from distorting our thinking, we have to remember…

None of your examples would disrupt the core business from functioning (barring the huge reduction in reservations from SABRE but that’s a monopoly exchange, which is a different problem). Disrupting paychecks, retirement, healthcare, stock issuance, etc were all annoying but the business would not cease to make money and those were all relatively interchangeable with other providers or had offline alternatives. The…

>The key difference with this current cloud embrace is that big billion dollar businesses are making their core business dependent on Amazon/Google/Microsoft cloud services.

There's still some history missing there. Before AWS/GCP/Azure, billion dollar businesses were making their _core_ business dependent on datacenters owned by HP/IBM/Sungard/Origin/Exodus/etc. E.g. Google's early search engine (their core business) in 1999 ran on servers at Exodus datacenter. Many of The Washington Post's core computing was provided by IBM's data center before Amazon AWS existed. In the 1990s, many businesses also had SAP ERP for core business processes that was managed by outsourced datacenters. (Both HP and IBM offered "managed SAP" hosting services.) When SAP went down, manufacturing lines got shut down, or no products got picked for shipping and trucks would sit idling. It's a similar disruption with AWS outages today.

Therefore, switching from lesser known and older "cloud" such as Origin/Exodus/etc to AWS/Azure/GCP is not that radical or as dangerous as some believe. Before AWS, many companies still depended and trusted other companies to provide off-premise reliable computer infrastructure. We just didn't call it "cloud" back in the 1990s.

Today's AWS/Azure/GCP with their modern multi-zone failover architectures are more reliable than the old HP/Origin datacenters that businesses used to depend on.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#76

Post by erinnh »

scarface74 wrote: post #65
Nextgrid wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So the end result was that it wasn’t effective. Imagine that, ineffective government regulations with regards to tech. Who would have thought?

So the end result should be that we dont try?

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#77

Post by flarg »

AriaMinaei wrote: post #12

> ... cloud apps depend on the service continuing to be available: if the service is unavailable, you cannot use the software, and you can no longer access your data created with that software. This means you are betting that the creators of the software will continue supporting it for a long time — at least as long as you care about the data. Although there does not seem to be a great danger of Google shutting down…

If you're emailing links to Google docs and you expect them to last for 5 years then you're doing it all wrong. Google Docs are great for collaboration, authoring, review, publication, but durable publication or archiving is a different use case that only a permanent, self managed, URI based solution can deliver. I guess that's part of what you're alluding to.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#78

Post by zurfer »

RivieraKid wrote: post #74

What's the origin of the "X-first" language pattern? Earliest example I cam remember is when Eric Schmidt was talking about "mobile first" approach.

Nice question. I am not that old and only further aware of the more recent "cloud first" and "america first"

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#80

Post by toast0 »

jasode wrote: post #75
kortilla wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of your examples would disrupt the core business from functioning (barring the huge reduction in reservations from SABRE but that’s a monopoly exchange, which is a different problem). Disrupting paychecks, retirement, healthcare, stock issuance, etc were all annoying but the business would not cease to make money and those were all relatively interchangeable with other providers or had offline alternatives. The…

>The key difference with this current cloud embrace is that big billion dollar businesses are making their core business dependent on Amazon/Google/Microsoft cloud services. There's still some history missing there. Before AWS/GCP/Azure, billion dollar businesses were making their _core_ business dependent on datacenters owned by HP/IBM/Sungard/Origin/Exodus/etc. E.g. Google's early search engine (their core business…

Exodus and similar colocations aren't really the same thing. They're selling you rack space with connectivity, you bring the servers. If you outgrow that, or they go out of business, you 'only' need to get connectivity to a new facility and drive your servers across town.

If you outgrown IBM/AWS/etc, you need to get connectivity and servers and run any services you were relying on. That's a lot bigger dependency.

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