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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?

#61

Post by belval »

piker wrote: post #34
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?

> your organisation is so inefficient

Very few organizations are able to stay efficient on the long run as they scale. This is a simple matter of processes being stacked on top of processes and inter-departement frictions. That complexity is inherent to having regulations and laws that you need to comply with that become hard requirements.

For a more concrete example think of HIPAA compliance, during an audit you can have everything on-prem and hope that your IT department actually understand the security and privacy boundaries or have everything in AWS and be compliant because they conform to the standard by default.

> syphon off any profitability

For most of those businesses software is not the profitable bit, it's a cost center like most other things that serve to support operations. In that context, migrating your code to AWS/GCP/Azure means very little cost inflation.

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

#62

Post by tclancy »

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.

Probably 70% that and 30% cowboys who think security and policy rules are for people who make mistakes.

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

#63

Post by nottorp »

What cloud? The $5 VPS with a basic linux on it? Or AWS with so many services that you will never be able to get out of without discarding all previous work?

It's also pretty sad that all the speed advances in the past 10 years have been squandered on ... running javascript.

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

#64

Post by jedahan »

samwillis wrote: post #48
this_user wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Discord's UX is miles ahead of Element, and I setup and maintain communities on that use both. For something like local-first, like a local principled makerspace, we are happy to deal with the friction and try and contribute back on Matrix/Element.

That said, infrastructure churn can be disruptive. Don't envy your position.

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

#65

Post by shafyy »

akho wrote: post #27
shafyy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CleanShot X for Mac is a great example of this. It's basically a screenshotting and screen recording tool that you install. But you can also tell it to upload your images and videos to their cloud and get a link to share them with your friends or coworkers (especially helpful for screencasts for example).

Why not dropbox or whatever place you use to share files normally? a screenshot program does not need a cloud.

It's completely optional. And it's very convenient to record a screencast and have it uploaded to the cloud with one click which also copies the share URL to your clipboard at the same time. I don't use Dropbox or a similar service, so this is a real value added for me.

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

#66

Post by ilc »

belval wrote: post #61
piker wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> your organisation is so inefficient Very few organizations are able to stay efficient on the long run as they scale. This is a simple matter of processes being stacked on top of processes and inter-departement frictions. That complexity is inherent to having regulations and laws that you need to comply with that become hard requirements. For a more concrete example think of HIPAA compliance, during an audit you can…

Just because AWS is HIPAA compliant, doesn't mean what you do there is :).

But at least it solves the basics.

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

#67

Post by theshrike79 »

piker wrote: post #34
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?

I can literally right now, sitting here in my underwear, spin up 4 clustered servers in 3 different continents with a globally replicated object storage and a master + 2 slaves setup of SQL databases on each location.

And all that for less than the price of _one_ competent sysadmin's monthly salary.

How would you suggest a company would match that with local servers and sysadmins?

One sysadmin per 8 hour shift = 3 people for 24 hour rotation, you need 1-2 extra so that if one is sick the others don't need to pull a double. That's $400k a year alone.

Then you need to get the 12 identical servers purchased and shipped around the globe to colocation. Now at least one, preferably two, of the admins needs to be a proficient DBA so they can get the replicating SQL running.

Now you need to build monitoring for all of that and runbooks on what to do if crap breaks outside of office hours.

..and now a server has kicked the bucket, you need to buy a new one from $vendor, get it delivered and set up in Australia - you're in Michigan.

And in some years the servers are underpowered because your business has grown, now you need to buy 12 new ones and get them installed.

I can do all that from home without putting on my pants. I might need to grab a shirt if the AWS people want to hop on Zoom for something. =)

This is why we use the cloud and managed services, usually it's either out of our hands anyway or already fixed when we manage to log in. For the last two biggest downtimes I've encountered even Meta's crap was offline too (FB, Instagram at least).

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

#68

Post by zimbatm »

taylodl wrote: post #39
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…

Sure. Come back to us in twelve months.

Either the company will have lost control of their spending and be sending 6-7 figure paychecks towards AWS. Or the ops team will have clamped down on the accounts and now you have to go trough the same process to get EC2 instances and other cloud resources.

Solving cultural problems with technology generally doesn't work.

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

#69

Post by monocasa »

ilc wrote: post #66
belval wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your organisation is so inefficient Very few organizations are able to stay efficient on the long run as they scale. This is a simple matter of processes being stacked on top of processes and inter-departement frictions. That complexity is inherent to having regulations and laws that you need to comply with that become hard requirements. For a more concrete example think of HIPAA compliance, during an audit you can…

Just because AWS is HIPAA compliant, doesn't mean what you do there is :). But at least it solves the basics.

I think their point is that it gives you a relatively stable env, and allows you to be the one deploying and configuring infrastructure. Anything that can be miscommunicated to client on-prem deployment staff will be, in a lot of cases breaking guarantees like HIPAA compliance.

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

#70

Post by theshrike79 »

weberer wrote: post #44
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.

I still remember the time when "server" meant someone's old Dell tower we put in a closet somewhere =)

I thought we figured out it's a shitty idea and moved past it?

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