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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?

#11

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?

> originally we were all going to be able to host our own stuff in our closets, the 'intelligence' goes in the edges.

This would have required fiber to the home with symmetric upload and ipv6 and ISPs not blocking all the ports.

In the US, the vast majority of people still only have access to a crappy coaxial cable broadband connection, where they allocate a few Mb/s upload to a whole neighborhood.

The lack of that basic infrastructure and demand for always connected devices meant hosting at home was never an option for the broad populace, and so the market never had an opportunity to deliver those solutions.

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

#12

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?

> originally we were all going to be able to host our own stuff in our closets, the 'intelligence' goes in the edges. This would have required fiber to the home with symmetric upload and ipv6 and ISPs not blocking all the ports. In the US, the vast majority of people still only have access to a crappy coaxial cable broadband connection, where they allocate a few Mb/s upload to a whole neighborhood. The lack of that b…

This is the norm in Sweden, aside from Port 25, which you shouldn't be using anyway.

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

#13

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 geographical places to achieve that. for me decentralization = resilience

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

#14

I don't know what this fluff is doing on HN. They make it sound like the Cloud Mafia forces everyone to use their server farms, instead of offering a product that people willingly choose to use. The rest is some hazy hype of CRDTs, as if their usage magically eliminated editing conflicts. Kleppmann is legit and his book is great, he deserves better than this.

They do force it. The force your non technical CEO and your non technical customers to value these stupid cloud servers far too highly. This forces many to embrace cloud tech purely for marketing reasons.

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

#15
post #13

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…

Managed bare metal hosting?

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

#16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> originally we were all going to be able to host our own stuff in our closets, the 'intelligence' goes in the edges. This would have required fiber to the home with symmetric upload and ipv6 and ISPs not blocking all the ports. In the US, the vast majority of people still only have access to a crappy coaxial cable broadband connection, where they allocate a few Mb/s upload to a whole neighborhood. The lack of that b…

This is the norm in Sweden, aside from Port 25, which you shouldn't be using anyway.

The connection is, but nobody’s using it to host local servers.

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

#17
post #15
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Managed bare metal hosting?

Does that actually mitigate the issues people have with Cloud stuff though? It's still "someone else's computer" at the end of the day. You're still having to deal with the eccentricities of whatever management layer they have on top of the computer to be able to rent it out to you. The fact that you're not buying it from Google or Amazon doesn't really make it less "cloud" in the "it's not local-first" sense.

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

#18
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the norm in Sweden, aside from Port 25, which you shouldn't be using anyway.

The connection is, but nobody’s using it to host local servers.

*Nobody?*

ahem; https://git.drk.sc is hosted in my home office.

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

#20

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.

I do mostly remember and encounter with on-premise datacenters the following pains

- Small selection of services (databases, queue's,...) If a service was not yet in house, brace yourself for a year of meetings, enterprise contracts, security audits,...

- Overprovisioning of everything as it was a weekly to monthly process to acquire new resources

- lots of half-assed documentation with many manual steps being missed. Sometimes the DEV environment was so different from the PROD environment you couldn't reliable trust deployments.

- lots of outdated software and servers with tooling that promised to ease all of that while delivering none of it.

- different teams for different components, all with their own procedures, zero API's and you hoping that the one guy that actually helps you is not on a holiday.

- Very strange limitations because how all the different vendors had their own set of restrictions and zero incentive to adopt another vendors solution.

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