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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?

#91

Post by ldjkfkdsjnv »

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…

Yup. Most complaints about the cloud are people who dont understand how to use it. They have been left behind and havent reskilled. They call it "too complex". In reality, using AWS is 10000x better than some custom infrastructure.

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

#92

Post by gizmo »

theshrike79 wrote: post #67
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?

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 pe…

The alternative to the cloud isn't running a server in the broom closet. It's running (racks of) dedicated hardware in a datacenter. Even "on premise" is often in a datacenter somewhere, and thanks to virtualized networking it's just as if the hardware is in the same building.

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

#93

Post by regularfry »

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…

At my last org, the exec reaction to the cloud was to say we should build our own, AWS-compatible, in our own DC's.

Yes, really.

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

#95

Post by btbuildem »

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…

Our org decided to take the worst of both worlds; now we have "IS requests to (I shit you not) create a branch in a repo" level of nonsense. The cliques with their turfs still exist, the hoops are still there to jump through, and the "cloud tech" is just absorbed into the corporate ineptitude mindset.

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

#96

Post by fsflover »

samwillis wrote: post #59
Znafon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://matrix.org/blog/2023/02/09/finally-a-hybrid-conferen...

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

#97

Post by bpodgursky »

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.

> Solving cultural problems with technology generally doesn't work.

That's a ridiculous statement! Technology is the prime driver of culture! If you want to effect lasting change, the last thing you should do is try to convince people you are right. Set up the technical infrastructure to support the culture you want!

In fact, it's the reverse — culture has practically no impact on technology once deployed.

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

#98

Post by JohnMakin »

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…

The other nice thing about primarily cloud infrastructures is, as an infra/ops guy I can build tooling and abstractions over it to allow developer and BI teams to go much faster without my help at all. An on-prem solution can allow this, but the fact that so much of the complexity is managed by the cloud provider makes it a lot faster and easier. A feature that could take months to roll out is usually offered by AWS for a price tag that's easy for the business to understand.

My one irritation with stuff like AWS is that a lot of it is needlessly esoteric, to the point where I think they make their docs bad on purpose to get you to buy their enterprise support packages.

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

#99

Post by dgudkov »

Thaxll wrote: post #83
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...

Exactly the same things now happen in your cloud provider. Now you just don't see them.

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

#100

Post by nilptr »

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.

> Solving cultural problems with technology generally doesn't work.

Solving cultural problems is indeed difficult but most of us are not going to be at a company long enough to give a shit. The name of they game is taking money off the table and the best way to do that is to deliver value quickly and then move to the next table.

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