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Fuck the Cloud (2009)
41–50 of 235 posts
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#42When everything was "moving to the cloud" a few years ago (around when Jason wrote this), I started to have similar feelings. It all felt like something marketers were over-hyping. "Your computer in the cloud" (ever had a shell account that was your main system? This isn't new), "your games in the cloud! Ever played Nethack using that shell account? I guess the only 'new' thing that I saw was the scaling capabilities…
The thing that annoys me is the idea that I should pay for a service that I've never needed so that I can store everything on the cloud. Actually, I should pay for three or four services. It's really not a good deal for me.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#43>Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of. I don't understand this logic. Amazon's S3 offers service level agreements with failure rates that at one point implied the statistical likelihood of losing an object to be once in "thousands of years". When dealing with any sort of stable storage this is simply something I cannot offer. I couldn't produce a set up locally with the resources…
S3 seems great today, and is undoubtedly more technically reliable than any home solution, but history is littered with companies that closed down on very short notice leaving their users' data deleted or inaccessible. Not to mention that billing disputes or legal action could also affect your ability to get data from them.
(Jason Scott is speaking from experience here, as one of the people called in to do emergency archive response when these cloud businesses shut down.)
Edit: jacquesm points out the sudden death of cloudspaces.com, which I'd forgotten about: http://www.infoworld.com/article/2608076/data-center/murder-...
A single computer security problem (which happen on a daily basis, although not usually at this severity) could enable your cloud to be deleted.
The "counterparty risk" is small but ineradicable. The finance industry re-learnt this with Bear Stearns recently.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#44>Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of. I don't understand this logic. Amazon's S3 offers service level agreements with failure rates that at one point implied the statistical likelihood of losing an object to be once in "thousands of years". When dealing with any sort of stable storage this is simply something I cannot offer. I couldn't produce a set up locally with the resources…
Until your control panel gets hacked and you lose all your data. See: codespaces.com (assuming it wasn't an inside job or a dumb mistake, but even then the same rules apply). So no, DON'T BLOW ANYTHING INTO THE CLOUD THAT YOU DON'T HAVE A COPY OF. It has nothing to do with 'not invented here', it has everything to do with your inability to outsource your responsibilities. The degree to which people rely on others to…
> Until your control panel gets hacked and you lose all your data
This is just alarmism. If you really wanted to demonstrate your point you would show me some data. The data would demonstrate that over the millions and millions of users on a number of cloud platforms that their rates of data loss are significantly higher than your "home spun" storage. Then you would take out the outliers and show an honest distribution on the most stable vendors(since I'd expect the majority of data loss over all vendors to have some amount of locality within a specific vendor). The result of this will be the rate of data loss on the most reliable cloud platforms. You can then compare this against your own success rates.
If you have ever(even once) lost even a single byte of data(for any reason), I do believe you will find yourself hopelessly outmatched.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#45>Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of. I don't understand this logic. Amazon's S3 offers service level agreements with failure rates that at one point implied the statistical likelihood of losing an object to be once in "thousands of years". When dealing with any sort of stable storage this is simply something I cannot offer. I couldn't produce a set up locally with the resources…
You need to think strategically about what you put on the cloud, because it's easy to overdo it. The decision inputs for an individual, startup and enterprise are all different.
The cost of getting stuff out of Amazon is very dear. While the statistical likelihood that Amazon will lose your stuff is low, the likelihood of Amazon or a competitor doing something to cause you to rethink your use of AWS (or force you to move) is much higher. Wanting to reduce your AWS costs in the long term is a near certainty.
As vendors move away from perpetually licensed software this gets more important. What happens when a vendor (say Microsoft for strawman purposes) decides that some function that is important to you must interface with Azure, and Azure only? What if Amazon decides upstream network transfers are no longer free? Those sorts of changes can break your business, and vendors like Amazon/Microsoft/Google are fully enabled to change those terms.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I suppose that this person wants to keep his data forever, but many people just don't care that much about their social media photos and the like. "This person" is Jason Scott, who works as the Internet Archive and also heads up Archive Team (the loose band of internet folks who race to archive sites about to go dark). He's a digital historian; his job is to save everything he can. https://twitter.com/textfiles htt…
This article doesn't really stand on its own; it comes across as a rambling diatribe by someone who is out of touch. If you have to know who the author of an article is to be persuaded by the argument given then it isn't very good. There are much better articles expressing this point of view.
>This article doesn't really stand on its own; it comes across as a rambling diatribe by someone who is out of touch.
Remember that next time you're red with rage because a cloud provider lost your data or a service you depended on is now bought/closed/gone.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#47AWS customer since 2007. Just pulled the plug on our last EC2 instance this week having migrated our stuff to a provider offering root servers for the cost of m3.medium. Our requirements are simple and we have no need for high-load/high-end layers. We used to have 50-100 VMs depending on the time of the day, now less than 20 with the rest of the workloads migrated to Docker containers.
P.S. Can't delete Glacier Vaults for now as AWS enforces a cooling period.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#48This is an old article and is almost entirely op-ed. No idea how this got to the top of page on HN. :/
Maybe because opinions are also valid intellectually?
Mere data driven conclusions get nowhere without a point of view and an end goal to accompany them.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#49When everything was "moving to the cloud" a few years ago (around when Jason wrote this), I started to have similar feelings. It all felt like something marketers were over-hyping. "Your computer in the cloud" (ever had a shell account that was your main system? This isn't new), "your games in the cloud! Ever played Nethack using that shell account? I guess the only 'new' thing that I saw was the scaling capabilities…
My mom was a mainframe programmer and says the cloud it is just like what they had 50 years ago with timesharing but a different name. I just smile and nod. Is such a statement much different than saying PCs are just tiny mainframes with a screens attached?
You aren't timesharing your tiny mainframe, so it is quite different, yes. The cloud is precisely what your mom had on a mainframe 50 years ago, including virtualization, on-the-fly scaling of resources (maybe a little more difficult because of the larger equipment), and even renting time on computers you didn't have in your offices, since not every institution could afford their own computer.
Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think most people have more of there savings in stuff than banks. (Clothes, PC, car, House etc.) At scale cash is a proxy for wealth not actual wealth. PS: A home loan might seem like the bank owns your house, but they can't say no when you sell it.
How about 401K and Social Security ?
Social Security is not wealth, as to 401K average savings is not that high.
http://blog.personalcapital.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/4... Note that's only for people with open 401(k) accounts. Also it's pretax, so subtract ~25-35+% from those numbers.
For comparison the average house is worth ~180k.