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…
How does the user switch from using database in the cloud to using one on their desktop?
Local-first software (2019)
101–110 of 136 posts
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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), situat…
There have been times that the control plane blew up in one zone of one cloud provider.
I had a least-complexity system which lived in that zone so it kept functioning as if nothing happened.
Other people panicked or had their automation freak out for them, they tried to restore their multi-AZ systems, overloading the control plane for the whole region.
It's a stressful experience if you feel you can't do anything about it, and sooner or later you will feel it with cloud computing: periods of 8-12 hours where your environment is FUBAR and you are best having some faith they will stitch it back together and walk away from it for a while.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#103That's a huge load of responsibility taken off the software supplier's shoulders and it eliminates the entire cost and complexity of building and maintaining Cloud based data management infrastructure.
And that's a pretty great option to have on the table for both users and software makers.
I'll also note that these apps consume almost no network bandwidth. With Service Workers implemented they barely speak to your server. The amount of bandwidth that can be potentially saved has got to be pretty huge.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#104Earlier 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…
That's a very good point, thanks for bringing it up, with all the examples to back it up. I agree that "cloud" is becoming a thought-terminating cliché (and I myself fall prey to reflexive reactions to that word all too often). I think the core issue is something different - it's about relationships . It's a point of view I've been exploring recently, and I find it to be illuminating. Some thoughts: 1. Individuals do…
I work for a small unit of a large organization now and we have a highly formal process for buying SaaS subscriptions. You fill out some paperwork explaining why you need it, in 1 to 2 weeks you tend to hear it is approved or (best of all) the large organization has a site license already they can put you on.
You have to have some brakes on subscriptions.
I worked at a small co where we had maybe 20-30 different SaaS tools that we stored "documents" in. Every week we had an all hands and somebody would bring up the problem that they can't find documents and that the answer is that we need to have a new place to put documents.
The group seemed impervious to the obvious objection that having more possible places to put documents would make it harder to find documents. So we wound up with a lot of SaaS subscriptions, a lot of talking, but very little listening.
The obvious business response that to problem is to build "one ring to rule them all"; e.g. a small instance of the thing that the n.s.a. uses to read your email, sans the cryptoanalysis bit.
That's an astonishingly hard sell. On one hand that system is an existential threat to all SaaS vendors from Salesforce.com to the very smallest. So you know you'll get resistance.
Even though Google is great at making money from ads, the search is not impressive in 2020. (Look at the second page of results, then the third, and ask "why do they bother showing any of this crap?") Corporations still buy OpenText. Ask people what is a scalable full-text search engine and they say "Solr" (have you really seen how it executes queries?) The only full-text search I like these days is pubmed.
We can do better.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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), situat…
It goes both ways. There have been times that the control plane blew up in one zone of one cloud provider. I had a least-complexity system which lived in that zone so it kept functioning as if nothing happened. Other people panicked or had their automation freak out for them, they tried to restore their multi-AZ systems, overloading the control plane for the whole region. It's a stressful experience if you feel you c…
If my colo goes down. My customers are going to complain and think I am incompetent. If my cloud hosted infrastructure goes down and everyone else is down your customers are a lot more understanding.
“No one ever got fired for buying IBM”
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the barrier to entry is "don't be a dick and sell data to whomever you like without telling your customers", it's kinda a good barrier, or not? Regulation isnt a black and white/good or bad thing. It can be either.
Think about a regulation being passed that says if you allow user generated content, you must have a system in place to prevent copyright infringement. Would a startup be able to design such a system? It would give FB and Google an advantage.
But acting as if all regulation is terrible and we should let the massive corporations simply walk over us is also not realistic.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think about a regulation being passed that says if you allow user generated content, you must have a system in place to prevent copyright infringement. Would a startup be able to design such a system? It would give FB and Google an advantage.
I already said that its not black and white? I dont know why youre trying to argue as if Im saying all regulation is perfect? But acting as if all regulation is terrible and we should let the massive corporations simply walk over us is also not realistic.
The US House just had a dog and pony show with the tech CEOs where one representative asked Zuckerburg about Twitter’s content policy.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I already said that its not black and white? I dont know why youre trying to argue as if Im saying all regulation is perfect? But acting as if all regulation is terrible and we should let the massive corporations simply walk over us is also not realistic.
Do you trust the government to know the difference? The US House just had a dog and pony show with the tech CEOs where one representative asked Zuckerburg about Twitter’s content policy.
And considering a lot of regulation that is passing in the EU I think is at the very least a good step in the right direction, I would say its going pretty well.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you trust the government to know the difference? The US House just had a dog and pony show with the tech CEOs where one representative asked Zuckerburg about Twitter’s content policy.
Much more than any company that often are headed by literal psychopaths. At least I can vote for my representatives. And considering a lot of regulation that is passing in the EU I think is at the very least a good step in the right direction, I would say its going pretty well.
Do you know who our President is?
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Re: Local-first software (2019)
#110I think there's probably a market for a personal cloud, which probably sounds dumber than personal computer did in the 80s. What I mean by that is a computer somewhere in the garage, like a furnace, with enough compute and storage to drive all the devices and appliances in a house. In this model, devices do not have CPUs or memory, only input/output and a network chip. The way this would work is for the computer in t…
I wonder if there would be market for community clouds , or neighborhood computes ? Imagine that a new apartment building comes bundled with a server room in the basement. Every dweller gets compute/storage there. This could serve as edge cache for services like Netflix/YouTube, as well as for the ecosystem you describe. I once imagined that homomorphic encryption would allow people to store data in their personal/ne…