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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?

#81

Post by jeanlou »

delfinom wrote: post #73
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…

>Very few organizations are able to stay efficient on the long run as they scale Simply using AWS doesn't do anything to help with this in that same long run. Give it a decade or two and those same organizations will suddenly have multiple bureaucratic departments to approve new AWS resources and spending. All AWS is offering is a channel that a bureaucratic process hasn't been developed for _yet_ and the organizatio…

Good luck maintaining your own infra, server, system middle war combo. It's a whole area in itself. Let the specialists do it and focus on your core business. Saying otherwise is just a lack of pragmatism.

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

#82

Post by pphysch »

inconceivable wrote: post #45

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 o…

Can you give a ballpark figure by what factor AWS/Azure TCO exceeded yours?

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

#83

Post by Thaxll »

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #9

This is how things worked 15 years ago, before the “cloud” hype took off. In my opinion, things worked great. You could get stuff done. I’m intrigued that there’s a “movement”. I suppose that’s what you need to get news articles and promote change. What’s old is new.

Things did not worked great, you should see the bad practices about ci/cd, security etc ... let the dev ssh root into a linux box, 1000 days uptime, no patch...

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

#84

Post by retrocryptid »

Is this anything more than a research project? I've been monkeying around with p2p sensors streaming data over quic in my house cause IoT is just SO BROKEN. Config goes the other way with self-resolving data structures.

I hacked together a "wide area overlay" using manually configured IPv6 VPN tunnels, but am thinking of grafting bittorrent on top of it to communicate config info for the VPNs (or quic or tls tunnels, but they're sort of being used as poor-mans vpns, so I'll keep calling them that even though they're operating above layer 3.)

Everything I've done is a hack. I should document it so people can taunt me about its hackishness or be inspired by its "elegant re-purposing of existing technologies."

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

#85

Post by imchillyb »

theshrike79 wrote: post #70
weberer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The only 'shitty ideas' in business are those that cost the business and shareholders money.

Cloud computing can either be a necessity for a business, or a money-hole from which is derived little to no benefit to the company.

Most small businesses could thrive with a -local- small dedicated server/workstation, and locally managed network resources.

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

#86

Post by dakial1 »

That's why I think Hybrid Cloud is where corporations are headed to (which means a mix of Public & Private Clouds and On Prem Servers).

You would use your on-prem servers for the core (and predictable) demand, as scaling it takes time and CAPEX.

You use cloud for elastic demand and innovation.

Once you have the technology layer to orchestrate those things, it should be more effective for corporations, specially those with high computational demand, to have this kind of setup.

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

#87

Post by pphysch »

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?

It's working as intended. Conway's Law applied to the global context.

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

#89

Post by HumblyTossed »

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…

Cool, cool. Now it sounds like you're doing two jobs for the price of one.

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

#90

Post by taylodl »

zimbatm wrote: post #68
taylodl wrote: post #39

Earlier 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…

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.

It's been 4 years for our team? Maybe in 12 years things will be different, but this is where we are for now.
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