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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?

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most small businesses should be focused on their business, and not their IT.

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

#102
People that dont like the cloud are generally engineers who were left behind by the paradigm shift. They want development to go back to what they spent a decade learning. And so they complain about complexity or out of control cost. The truth is, they arent effective engineers with the cloud because they havent learned it in depth. It is clearly 100x better than on premise, and the boom in tech is partially from productivity gains from cloud. Infrastructure as Code is a major technological improvement.

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

#103
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…

> 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.

Hey I can do that too in our on-prem environment because it's well managed. Hell, I can do that in my fricken homelab if you'll accept postgress.

Cloud is neat and the major vendors know how to manage it. That doesn't mean you need to pay them to use a well managed platform, but you do need to pay _somebody_.

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

#104

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…

I don't get it. Surely there was a middle ground where prices weren't so low customers didn't think you were running a scam, but weren't so high they became "too expensive for what we offered"?

What you're describing doesn't seem to be anything unique to cloud; it's something every business deals with. Figuring out the right market segmentation to deliver cheaper prices to those who are more price-conscious, and more functionality to those who can pay.

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

#105
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 least with on-prem, you can talk to the infrstructure team's management to negotiate adding currently non-supported features.

I was hired at Amazon 8 years ago to implement a couple of features. One of them was difficult because it required communication / buy-in from multiple two pizza teams. By the time I left it was stalled. Three years ago I randomly started at an AWS customer who needed that feature as they had followed the AWS conventional wisdom for setting things up and architected themselves into a corner. I was able to craft some workarounds but they're hacky.

AWS has been promising us this feature "next quarter" for the last 3 years.

If you look around, you can find a number of weird corner-cases where AWS does not make it easy to do the simple thing you want to do, but you can hack around it.

We went looking at GCP and Azure and there are similar issues, though in different parts of the infrastructure.

Not to mention each of them change their interface frequently enough to be annoying. Thankfully, reverse incompatible changes are not at all the norm.

My cloud infrastructure is replete with architectural warts to avoid quirks we didn't know existed until after we deployed. My on-prim components, though managed by a different team, do what we want them to do because the team who built them asked us what we wanted before building it.

AWS weirdness accounts for about 85% of my time. On prim weirdness for 5%. But yes, local-first is obviously a non-starter.

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

#106
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.

You have to be able to beat the cloud locally to make doing so make sense. AWS et al. set the bar and it’s difficult to beat them with your local infrastructure.

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

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have to be able to beat the cloud locally to make doing so make sense. AWS et al. set the bar and it’s difficult to beat them with your local infrastructure.

They have 10000 engineers working 50 hours a week to keep their cloud running. The thing works on the back of very hard work from very smart people.

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

#108
post #49
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 run…

The entire structure is not value oriented.

The technical people want to solve technical problems and don't give a fuck about the company mission. The immediate management wants to improve the measurable recurrent tasks and don't even think about supporting anything different. The top management wants to cut jobs, minimize the need for competency, cut costs, minimize flexibility and lean time to think about non-recurrent tasks because IT is a cost center.

The result is that all of those problems you point get solved. That's not the issue. But nothing of value is allowed to exist.

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

#109

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…

I don't get it. Surely there was a middle ground where prices weren't so low customers didn't think you were running a scam, but weren't so high they became "too expensive for what we offered"? What you're describing doesn't seem to be anything unique to cloud; it's something every business deals with. Figuring out the right market segmentation to deliver cheaper prices to those who are more price-conscious, and more…

> Figuring out the right market segmentation to deliver cheaper prices to those who are more price-conscious, and more functionality to those who can pay.

yeah smart guy, that's what we did for over 10 years. then it became impossible (because it's AMZN and MSFT and GOOG, remember???). then i sold. now i never have to worry about that shit ever again.

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

#110
post #68
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.

It does by getting rid of the people.

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