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The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

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Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#31

Post by akho »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #11
BSEdlMMldESB wrote: post #3

the cloud is a failure of the internet originally we were all going to be able to host our own stuff in our closets, the 'intelligence' goes in the edges. then the industrialists went full-cloud on this idea. and the 'intelligence' got concentrated in a few gigantic industrial warehouses. but it sure feels more orderly this way. why spread the load when you can focus it and centralize it?

> originally we were all going to be able to host our own stuff in our closets, the 'intelligence' goes in the edges. This would have required fiber to the home with symmetric upload and ipv6 and ISPs not blocking all the ports. In the US, the vast majority of people still only have access to a crappy coaxial cable broadband connection, where they allocate a few Mb/s upload to a whole neighborhood. The lack of that b…

> fiber to the home

I used to self-host while I lived in an apartment with a proper Ethernet connection. Now I have GPON with all the implications vis-a-vis a crappy provider-provided router and shitty service due to their monopoly position, so no real external access for me.

My stuff is now tunneled through a VPS; it works fine, but I’m still salty.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#32

Post by dangus »

rc_mob wrote: post #14
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #7

I don't know what this fluff is doing on HN. They make it sound like the Cloud Mafia forces everyone to use their server farms, instead of offering a product that people willingly choose to use. The rest is some hazy hype of CRDTs, as if their usage magically eliminated editing conflicts. Kleppmann is legit and his book is great, he deserves better than this.

They do force it. The force your non technical CEO and your non technical customers to value these stupid cloud servers far too highly. This forces many to embrace cloud tech purely for marketing reasons.

Almost every company I’ve worked for in the last 10 years wouldn’t have even been founded in the first place without cloud computing.

The value of cloud computing is that it gets business logic in production fast with unlimited flexibility and a reduced dependence on cost center specialists in areas like operations, security, and database administration.

With cloud computing I can deploy my entire stack to a region in another part of the globe with ~10 lines of configuration, terraform apply and it’s done. I’m doing things by myself that I used to rely on multiple other people to handle (like setting up and maintaining databases, networking, firewalls, security tooling, etc).

I also used to waste a bunch of time maintaining vendor products that had nothing to do with the business. I used to have responsibilities like Jira administrator - ick!

The last time I worked for a company that had an on-premise data center I had a months-long email chain where I was told we were basically out of storage in a specific region so I had to wait for the VMs I requested.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#33

Post by multiplegeorges »

The work Ink & Switch (unaffiliated) do has been an inspiration to me with regard to local-first and decentralized software: https://www.inkandswitch.com

They have a quasi-manifesto on local-first (https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/) and have published the best rich text CRDT around, Peritext: https://www.inkandswitch.com/peritext/

Lots of interesting work happening in this space.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#34

Post by piker »

taylodl wrote: post #29

Anyone who's worked inside a large organization knows the cloud is the solution to be able to get things done and deliver value to the business. Why? On-prem solutions require I work with the infrastructure group, who wants to cookie-cutter me into their limited stable of infrastructure options; I have to work with the systems group, who gives me very limited options and configurations for the operating systems; the…

So your organisation is so inefficient that it’s easier to just engage a third party to syphon off any profitability?

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#36

Post by bzzzt »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #7

I don't know what this fluff is doing on HN. They make it sound like the Cloud Mafia forces everyone to use their server farms, instead of offering a product that people willingly choose to use. The rest is some hazy hype of CRDTs, as if their usage magically eliminated editing conflicts. Kleppmann is legit and his book is great, he deserves better than this.

The cloud providers that also sold local software (Microsoft, Oracle) push people to the cloud by increasing the price of local software and discounting their cloud offerings (for a while at least).

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#37

Post by candiddevmike »

taylodl wrote: post #29

Anyone who's worked inside a large organization knows the cloud is the solution to be able to get things done and deliver value to the business. Why? On-prem solutions require I work with the infrastructure group, who wants to cookie-cutter me into their limited stable of infrastructure options; I have to work with the systems group, who gives me very limited options and configurations for the operating systems; the…

It all comes down to responsibility. In your example, you're responsible for the full stack including infrastructure (I'm assuming, if not, I feel bad for your infrastructure team). This model works for some developer teams and not for others, either due to lack of expertise, free cycles, or organizational pressure to have developers focus on code only.

Define your responsibility model first, then your infrastructure consumption patterns.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#38

Post by tw04 »

taylodl wrote: post #29

Anyone who's worked inside a large organization knows the cloud is the solution to be able to get things done and deliver value to the business. Why? On-prem solutions require I work with the infrastructure group, who wants to cookie-cutter me into their limited stable of infrastructure options; I have to work with the systems group, who gives me very limited options and configurations for the operating systems; the…

And what is the operating margin of the products your group produces? What was it prior to shifting everything to the cloud?

If you can't answer those questions, you may be architecting yourself out of a job. I watched more than one company that was operating on razor-thin margins, depreciating hardware over a decade, move to the cloud and promptly bankrupt themselves.

If you're in a business where you've got an additional 20% margin to piss away on someone else's gear, your logic makes a ton of sense. If you're in one that's making 5% on every widget that goes out the door, you should probably be working with your management to figure out how to remove the inefficiencies from your process rather than just moving your problem onto someone else's hardware.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#39

Post by taylodl »

taylodl wrote: post #29

Anyone who's worked inside a large organization knows the cloud is the solution to be able to get things done and deliver value to the business. Why? On-prem solutions require I work with the infrastructure group, who wants to cookie-cutter me into their limited stable of infrastructure options; I have to work with the systems group, who gives me very limited options and configurations for the operating systems; the…

Forgot to mention - if you were doing anything new, plan to spend months getting that in on-prem. They're going to run an RFP, deliberate ad nauseam, try to build a business case the tool, procure infrastructure to host it, do five year usage projections so you can measure how you're going to capitalize - it just goes on, and on.

Our organization spent two years going through these gyrations for elastic search. They failed. It never happened. No other solution was brought on board, they simply couldn't justify the cost. All told they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to come up empty-handed. Meanwhile my new team had a project where elastic search was the obvious component as part of the solution and we simply used that service on AWS. Done.

It's been a while since I've worked at a startup or a mid-cap company, but for any company in the Fortune 500? Cloud is a godsend!

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#40

Post by api »

The cloud is DRM. Its popularity is primarily due to the ability to conveniently attach a recurring revenue model and decisively prevent piracy.

People expect local software to be free or very cheap, but in reality complex software applications with good UI/UX are extremely expensive to produce. The UI/UX aspects are often far more costly and time consuming than the core of the software. Basically computers are intrinsically hard to use and it takes tremendous effort to pound them into a shape that non-computer-experts can deal with without pain.

Lack of an economic model is why local software is nearly dead. Local is better in virtually every way except paying the developers.

You get what you pay for. If you won't pay for local software but will rent software in the cloud, you will only get cloud software.

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