Nothing beats Google Photos in speed and search. Nothing beats cloud for email hosting. Other things are debatable, but in general nothing beats cloud on ease of use and setup.
Nothing beats them yet...
The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?
51–60 of 215 posts
Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?
#52Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?
#53Anyone 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…
You're correct, the team is taking on all that responsibility - which is another reason we use serverless architectures. We have no intention of managing servers, provisioning servers, patching servers, etc. The whole idea of compute has been completely abstracted.
Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?
#54Anyone 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.
And there are good reasons why we abandoned that approach 20 years ago. It's a nightmare to support.
Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?
#55Anyone 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…
Yeah. The - possibly insoluble - problem is that if you don't go through all the approvals exercises, the people whose time would be taken up approving your thing are still there, drawing a salary. So there's no obvious cost/benefit analysis to do, or not one that's politik.
But I like the idea of just doing it using cloud. Once a cloud vendor is approved, all its services are implicitly approved as well. Nice.
Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?
#56Earlier 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.
Competent sysadmins who don't let the production DNS expire for example [0]? =)
Companies use the cloud because then they don't have to hire a dozen sysadmins to manage their servers, they can focus on building the actual product.
If I can choose between having 12 developers who can manage AWS and having a rotation of 8 sysadmins wrangling in-house servers in three shifts and 4 developers, I'll always choose the one with more developers.
Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?
#57The difficulty with cloudless apps is that if you want to sync between devices you still need somewhere to fetch your data from. In theory you can have some true end-to-end encrypted peer-to-peer network, but in practice it works much worse than a cloud app with a central server.
CRDTs are awesome and offline-first applications are much more responsive than the ajaxified status quo. But CRDTs work much better with a hub-and-spokes model when you know for sure the hub is always online and has sufficient bandwidth. All data can be stored stored locally by the client and the cloud service only serves a distribution channel for end-to-end encrypted data that's a pragmatic middle road where you still have the convenience of the cloud but not the lock-in.
Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah. The - possibly insoluble - problem is that if you don't go through all the approvals exercises, the people whose time would be taken up approving your thing are still there, drawing a salary. So there's no obvious cost/benefit analysis to do, or not one that's politik. But I like the idea of just doing it using cloud. Once a cloud vendor is approved, all its services are implicitly approved as well. Nice.
> Once a cloud vendor is approved, all its services are implicitly approved as well. Nice.
Exactly! When we start a new project the AWS Console is just a big tool box we open to see what's available that we can use to deliver the solution.
Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Isn't that what email and mailing lists are for?
They are hosting monthly meet-ups - mini conferences - with video chat and presentations. Not local first solution to that yet.
Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?
#60I have a hard time squaring the push of this, with the rise of the embedded VSCode in github to edit in your browser. Actually, really just the damned browser. It has been both a god send for software delivery and by far the biggest mistake/road block in building local software.
I remember in college I commented that I used a web browser based email provider because it was easily accessible, and one of the old guard chided that telnet was more accessible. I honestly felt properly chided and didn't understand why I was more inclined to think the web would be available. Fast forward to today, and I don't know many people at all that don't use a browser based email system. We certainly exist, but not in meaningful numbers.
Then there is the sheer idiocy of keeping up with home storage options. It isn't that a terabyte drive is expensive. It is that keeping it indexed with the latest search friendly media is. Why do that when you can offload the idea to someone else? (There are certainly reasons, but they are niche.)
Worse, we're a generation or three removed from people that built giant media collections that become liabilities more than anything else. I literally have a stack of records behind me with no record player. I have a few CDs that aren't available on streaming platforms behind me, and I don't really have a CD player anymore. Mountains of books that make me happy to have, but I'd be a liar if I claimed they were wise purchases. Most, if I'm honest, were hoarder indulgences that I should have kept closer tabs on by using a library. In the modern world, I can donate to authors easily enough.
So, I'd love for some of this story to be true. I just don't see it.