Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 215 posts

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

#111

Post by hotpotamus »

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.

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

#112

Post by planetafro »

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…

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.

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

#113

Post by stcroixx »

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…

I see you're sold so I won't try to change your mind, but be aware your opinion is far from universal. I'd rather eat broken glass than work with proprietary cloud technologies.

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

#114

Post by r00fus »

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…

I have direct multi-year experience where an AWS heavy client (with a strong tie to Amazon) decided to shift course because AWS spend went nearly vertical despite the velocity of features delivered, and moved to migrate all logic/data into other enterprise systems where possible.

So for the first few months, it was moving all business logic to lambdas/RDS then the next year, moving it all back elsewhere - not necessarily on-prem, but anywhere except AWS.

So I'd expect your cloud team to get very much like infra once cost realities become involved. It's possible your volumes/costs are much less for the features you build - in that case, kudos to designing stuff that is perf-aware - but sometimes you don't control volume and that's a cost-risk.

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

#115

Post by unethical_ban »

planetafro wrote: post #112
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…

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 incredible for security.

And using IaC, you can put guardrails on specific tasks that IT does often. Manual reviews become automated.

It is a ton of conversion and up front work, but there are upsides.

And then of course there is the instant global reliability, where a lot of formerly complicated sysops becomes automated as well

Final thought: other than the hardware abstraction, everything I talked about re: IAM could be done with a local software stack, if it existed.

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

#116

Post by [deleted] »

akho wrote: post #31
lotsofpulp wrote: post #11

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…

> fiber to the home I used to self-host while I lived in an apartment with a proper Ethernet connection. Now I have GPON with all the implications vis-a-vis a crappy provider-provided router and shitty service due to their monopoly position, so no real external access for me. My stuff is now tunneled through a VPS; it works fine, but I’m still salty.

[deleted]

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

#117

Post by ilc »

samwillis wrote: post #51
troupo wrote: post #35

Nothing beats Google Photos in speed and search. Nothing beats cloud for email hosting. Other things are debatable, but in general nothing beats cloud on ease of use and setup.

Nothing beats them yet...

It is really hard to beat fill in form, push button, get service that is likely better than your on-site staff can provide, especially for small or medium businesses.

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

#118

Post by BSEdlMMldESB »

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…

i don't?

I just wanna have physical ownership of the photos I upload into the cloud

if my shit goes down, only me is to blame and only me has a problem

if my house get's blown over by a river, I have bigger problems than streaming music from my own personal server and backing up my own photos

in a more ideal world, I have some replication on 'friends' servers. but nobody runs their own shit.

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

#119

Post by unethical_ban »

regularfry wrote: post #93
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.

I'm actually shocked that aside from S3 clones, no piece of software or open source project has attempted to replicate the software ecosystem of the cloud as it pertains to APIs and IAM.

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

#120

Post by ur-whale »

nilptr wrote: post #100
zimbatm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I pity the fool who hired you. Or will hire you, for that matter.

Post reply on HN