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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?

#181

Post by optimalquiet »

johnklos wrote: post #26

I'm happy for an article like this that I can invite people to read. I often tell people that the "cloud" is a lock-in for subscription based everything, where you have literally no control of your data nor the slightest insight in to who can access it, where all privacy boils down to whether mega-corporations don't lie, and so many other compromises and shortcomings. Most of the responses are, "but it works for me",…

And this is why, as a hobbyist, I’m very skeptical of, for lack of a better term, the consumer cloud. We’re not talking about AWS here, we’re talking about companies’ servers (that are actually AWS on the back-end) that they use to offer services to consumers. They insist on calling that “cloud” because everything has to be confusing, I guess. And I think that distinction gets lost in the translation between hobbyists/power users and IT professionals/software engineers. I think those two groups often miscommunicate, because they use the same terms in different ways, because their worlds are so different.

It’s not about on-premises vs cloud for corporations, it’s about control over your data and what Apple’s marketing once called “your digital life” (before they went all-in on cloud) for consumers, for normal people, whose recourse when a company does something wrong isn’t “hire the best lawyers in the business and sue them” but “get screwed.” I don’t care what corporations do with their infrastructure, my concern is my own digital life, which is more important to me than the market cap of FAANG.

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

#182

Post by egypturnash »

iammjm wrote: post #13
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?

If everything is in your closet, how do you want to provide reliable auto-scale, redundancy, backups etc? I have friends in Ukraine, where shit literally blows up on a daily basis. And if this example is too extreme for you, I also have friends in Germany, where overflowing rivers remove whole houses once a year. There are services that need to be reachable all the time and you simply need replication in different ge…

Someone else's closet.

Maybe you have an agreement with another friend and a set of scripts that do this.

Maybe you're using some kind of decentralized backup system where you have a big blob of encrypted, de-duplicated Other People's Backups in exchange for all your stuff being treated the same.

Or maybe you just don't provide all of this, maybe the entire network expects your server to be fragile and is running everything in a virtual machine to start with. You just have a box in the closet that runs a node in the mesh, with however much power and storage you want to throw at it, and this grants you x% of those numbers from ClosetMesh. It's pretty cheap and easy to have enough ClosetMesh storage to do something useful in a box about the size of the one your phone came in.

There is probably at least one SF novel's worth of backstory between where we are now and the world where everything runs on top of ClosetMesh. Do you want to be part of it? There's a bunch of projects trying to make this sort of thing work.

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

#183

Post by dijit »

theshrike79 wrote: post #155
luma wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The premise was that one doesn’t already have a half a million dollar on-prem setup… Like a bootstrapped one or two person startup. Or could I borrow your globally distributed home lab? =) The difference here is that I can pay AWS by the hour (or even by the minute or second). I can’t hire a sysadmin like that. I can try a few high GPU instances for 6 hours and shut them down. But if I need to buy 6 4090’s and the ha…

> half a million dollar on-prem setup

Oh hey, that's my cloud spend.

EOM I have nothing, every month.

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

#184

Post by [deleted] »

pessimizer wrote: post #162
yonz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yonz here, I run the community and can be blamed for the 20+ swipes at the discord choice. We started in February 2023, and it has been amazing to see the now ~1k developers coming together and building awesome collaborations like Tinybase + Cr-sqlite. Yes, we need a community platform aligned with our mission, but it is already hard enough to get people together. Before the website or the discord, it was just a bunc…

The effectiveness of using Discord for your community is a fact that undermines the community's only purpose. You use Discord as a stepping stone because it works, but if you don't prioritize moving off of it to an effective replacement above any and all more costly efforts and issues, it's hard to believe in the authenticity of purpose. I'm not implying here that you are not prioritizing moving on (how would I know)…

[deleted]

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

#185

Post by charcircuit »

theshrike79 wrote: post #168
charcircuit wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to be able to instantly spin up servers collocated you just need to have spare capacity. There is nothing that restricts you from delaying expanding your capacity until you need it. That is what slows you down.

Try going "Hey boss, I need 20k for some servers I'm just going to let sit in their shipping boxes in case we need them later." (or you can install them but not use them for anything). Come tell me how it went =) I've yet to see a manager who wants to spend money up front for stuff they might possibly need in the future. YMMV

Capacity planning is the process in which you estimate how many servers you are going to need. If you overestimate it just means there is extra time before you will need more servers.

You would be spending that 20k regardless assuming the company is growing.

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

#186

Post by icedchai »

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...

I briefly worked for a medium sized web company (millions of registered users, 100's of employees, pretty large infrastructure.) It was hosted on AWS. I would regularly SSH into production instances that had 1000 days uptime, no patches, OS releases that from 5+ years ago, etc.

Oh yeah, they were still running Python 2 for parts of the main application. It was literally like traveling back a decade. I found dependencies that hadn't been updated in 10 years.

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

#187

Post by unethical_ban »

freedude wrote: post #172
unethical_ban wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone who did it for two years, I know not everything is perfect. But the tooling, monitoring, automation, orchestration, etc. becomes a lot easier when there are 4-5 toolsets vs. dozens.

It's like taking an ops support team that is using perl, java, php, python, bash, ksh running on RHEL5 and HP-UX and getting everyone on RHEL8, terraform and Go.

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

#189

Post by stevenicr »

yonz wrote: post #139
this_user wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Local First > "Join our Discord"

Yonz here, I run the community and can be blamed for the 20+ swipes at the discord choice. We started in February 2023, and it has been amazing to see the now ~1k developers coming together and building awesome collaborations like Tinybase + Cr-sqlite. Yes, we need a community platform aligned with our mission, but it is already hard enough to get people together. Before the website or the discord, it was just a bunc…

I'd like to suggest that running wordpress with buddypress may fit the bill... and if you need chat (instead of the chat-similar groups messaging which is baked in) - you can also add wisechat to the mix.

This system is loads easier than matrix imho - although I love love love matrix and want it to continue to succeed and be used.

Blocking spam user signups and setting security plugins and auto-updates is not baked in.. but it's not hard and it's all open source - can run on a droplet or vps easily.

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

#190

Post by mixmastamyk »

taylodl wrote: post #54
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.

And there are good reasons why we abandoned that approach 20 years ago. It's a nightmare to support.

It’s just a local copy of many, and can run even when offline. Like git. No nightmares.
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