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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?

#171

Post by yonz »

oblib wrote: post #151
yonz wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing your experience, what was the app? Personally, I don't think I would have gone through the trouble as well. For example, I used to have a ton of Evernote entries and don't think I would setup a personal CouchDB just to get access to it. A middle ground could be a file path to an sqlite file that can be copied, opened or backed up in the cloud.

The app is at ezInvoice.com. CouchDB is really a very good fit for that app. In the early versions of the app I used CGI.pm to store and get user data and that was very fast and efficient, and the format for storing data was similar to CouchDB's (JSON), so it felt more familiar for me to work with. I had never worked with SQL before making that app. I had a partner back then create a new version that used an SQL db.…

NoSQL is definitely a breeze for data model use cases like that.

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

#172

Post by freedude »

unethical_ban wrote: post #115
planetafro wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious -- in this scenario, who is doing security, governance, compliance, observability, etc...? You are probably masking a lot of benefits of a mature and competent IT team. ...or you are assuming A LOT of risk allowing velocity-driven software engineering teams to run amok.

My previous employer is or has already transitioned mostly to the cloud. The answer to your question is " the same teams that were doing it before, but with cloud guardrails instead of hacky bespoke solutions ". AWS IAM is baked into every single product natively. It isn't perfect and their JSON dialect is annoying at times, but having granular RBAC for storage, compute, ops, network in a single language is incredibl…

" the same teams that were doing it before, but with cloud guardrails instead of hacky bespoke solutions "

you do realize that "cloud guardrails" often started out life as "hacky bespoke solutions". you are assuming more business risk than is necessary.

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

#173

Post by freedude »

I was reading through the comments after reading the article and realized some didn't take the time. So TLDR;

Local-first software is about doing the work on the device at hand securely, effortlessly and serverlessly collaborating on that work using data structures that are designed to facilitate local-first collaboration. It is a platform shift in software development and if you are "all-in" on cloud technology it would behoove you to understand its tenets if for no other reason then to know "who moved my cheese" in the future.

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

#174

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #163
inconceivable wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No need to be snarky/insulting here. It was just that your explanation purely on prices being either too low or too high seems incomplete. It's not clear why there wasn't a middle ground. On the other hand, not being able to compete against the scale of major cloud providers makes sense. It's just not clear how that's related to you starting out with prices that were too low.

[deleted]

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

#175

Post by petedrexel »

freedude wrote: post #173

I was reading through the comments after reading the article and realized some didn't take the time. So TLDR; Local-first software is about doing the work on the device at hand securely, effortlessly and serverlessly collaborating on that work using data structures that are designed to facilitate local-first collaboration. It is a platform shift in software development and if you are "all-in" on cloud technology it w…

Best I can do is edge.

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

#176

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #163
inconceivable wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No need to be snarky/insulting here. It was just that your explanation purely on prices being either too low or too high seems incomplete. It's not clear why there wasn't a middle ground. On the other hand, not being able to compete against the scale of major cloud providers makes sense. It's just not clear how that's related to you starting out with prices that were too low.

[deleted]

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

#177

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #163
inconceivable wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No need to be snarky/insulting here. It was just that your explanation purely on prices being either too low or too high seems incomplete. It's not clear why there wasn't a middle ground. On the other hand, not being able to compete against the scale of major cloud providers makes sense. It's just not clear how that's related to you starting out with prices that were too low.

[deleted]

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

#178

Post by inconceivable »

pphysch wrote: post #82
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?

to keep it simple, think of a 42u rack stuffed to the gills with servers and switches.

that would cost us maybe $10k a month on the margin, and we could resell and manage it for nearly $50k a month. i'm betting amazon could milk it for $200k a month, possibly 2-3x that if it's GPU's.

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

#179

Post by dgudkov »

aequitas wrote: post #141
dgudkov wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You might see them. But it's far easier for a dev team to take control of the ops side in the cloud with IaC, API's and automated tooling like Terraform. It's still very hard to find companies that do on-prem, API first.

You didn't get the point. Your cloud provider can do things that you don't see and can't control. If you think all cloud provider's employees follows best security practices because they told you so, then good luck.

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

#180

Post by optimalquiet »

hotpotamus wrote: post #111
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #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 prod…

Infrastructure as code is indeed a major technological improvement, which is why I use it on-prem lol.

I’ll do you one better, I use IaC techniques to configure VMs at home, on an old workstation I’ve turned into a server.

It’s great for hobbyists, too, and doesn’t require the cloud although I will admit it’s easier to go all the way when resources are totally spin-up-as-needed. But I don’t need to go all the way, I’m just a simple hobbyist.

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