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

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

#41

Post by api » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 2:20 PM UTC

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…

Yeah, in addition to the recurring revenue aspect a major drive of cloud adoption is escaping your IT department.

This suggests that the way corporations do IT is radically wrong and actively harmful.

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

#42

Post by gottebp » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 2:22 PM UTC

Before it was called "local first" it was known as "subsidiarity". Seeing the principle applied to food, politics, software is exciting to me.

"Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if possible, rather than by a central authority".[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity_(Catholicism)

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

#43

Post by taylodl » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 2:23 PM UTC

tw04 wrote: post #38

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 addi…

We have those numbers. We reduced our costs by over 70%. We got the project approved claiming we'd reduce costs by 30%.

Obviously YMMV and the savings are going to be dependent on each project, but we've had enough solutions that we've had on-prem that we've shifted to AWS and show substantial cost savings that the business is comfortable with our taking new projects and just starting out in AWS.

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

#44

Post by weberer » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 2:24 PM UTC

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…

Did you read the article? "Local" here means running on the user's computer. It is not talking about private data centers.

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

#45

Post by inconceivable » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 2:25 PM UTC

i ran a hosting company. a successful one that made money for years. it made me millions of dollars.

i knew it was time to sell when prospective customers literally couldn't believe our prices. they thought we were full of shit, and accused us of being amateurs, fly-by-night scammers. and our prices weren't low - they just weren't insanely inflated like public cloud. we didn't deliberately try to undercut anyone on our quotes. it just started happening one day.

of course we raised our quotes to test the market but then they became too expensive for what we offered. lol. lmao. okay. as you can imagine running infrastructure is something people do not take lightly, so this is an uphill battle all the way. once you have no service or price edge the game is up.

so anyway, long story short, i can take a hint. i'm not nearly as smart as jeff bezos so it was time to gtfo of dodge. luckily with those 0% interest rates we found a buyer and anyone stuck in public cloud hell due to their own incompetence can kiss my ass because we fuckin' told you so.

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

#46

Post by this_user » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 2:27 PM UTC

samwillis wrote: post #2

I'm going all in on Local First, it addresses so many issues with the current "app" web. Better responsiveness from UI, working offline, privet data, lower server costs, just as a start. Somewhat counter to the article, I would argue that local first isn't about having "no cloud", it's "low cloud". So you could go P2P for sync, but you can also have a much more lightweight sync service on a central server. Both are v…

> Local First

> "Join our Discord"

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

#47

Post by shortrounddev2 » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 2:30 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #25

rc_mob wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Companies embrace cloud tech because it turns large capital budgets into operating budgets, and prevents dental implant companies or soda distributors from having to figure out how to hire competent sysadmins.

This is the important thing. So many people in tech think of these solutions in terms of tech, the ease of use of the tech, and the cost of the tech.

But the ultimate cost in everything is the cost of labor. On-premise solutions require on-premise administrators, with full time salaries (who are mostly sitting around waiting for work or problems to arise). It is far simpler and cheaper to contract the work out to a cloud provider and pay hourly for a tech's time. If you are a highly competent sysadmin you probably aren't working at a dental implant company. So the kinds of people non-tech companies hire are usually going to be lower quality and get paid less, increasing security risks

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

#48

Post by samwillis » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 2:30 PM UTC

this_user wrote: post #46

samwillis wrote: post #2

I'm going all in on Local First, it addresses so many issues with the current "app" web. Better responsiveness from UI, working offline, privet data, lower server costs, just as a start. Somewhat counter to the article, I would argue that local first isn't about having "no cloud", it's "low cloud". So you could go P2P for sync, but you can also have a much more lightweight sync service on a central server. Both are v…

> Local First > "Join our Discord"

Quite true there is some irony to that. There has been a little talk of building a local first community platform, sadly doesn't exist yet.

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

#49

Post by taylodl » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 2:30 PM UTC

api wrote: post #41

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…

Yeah, in addition to the recurring revenue aspect a major drive of cloud adoption is escaping your IT department. This suggests that the way corporations do IT is radically wrong and actively harmful.

I think it points to IT is much harder to do at scale than most people realize. There's a big difference between running a datacenter and running a server closet.

Companies utilize HR services, payroll services, and legal services, amongst many other services, because that's not in their wheelhouse and a part of their core competency, so why wouldn't they utilize cloud platforms as well? Like I said, managing and running multiple data centers having high-availability and DR capability isn't easy, or cheap.

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

#50

Post by jauntywundrkind » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 2:33 PM UTC

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…

On-prem thankfully is changing quickly. It used to be boutique, every shop kludging together their own plan, cobbling together an assorted mix of vendor and open source. There were few macro patterns.

The major change in the last 10 years is that there's now a very stable & general open-source cloud platform that covers a much wider range of the stack than what we had before, and which has achieved a critical mass of popularity.

On prem is still hard. Having an organization that isn't crufty & slow, where there aren't forms in triplicate & long waits for every request, is still hard. But it's gotten a lot easier than it was to bring up, and to let users do some self service. There's a small scale org where having a small handful of clusters & letting users semi-free, mostly using ci/cd, is quite attainable. Figuring out how to scale up to serving a mid or larger size org is still quite a challenge.