While Jason Scott raises interesting points six years ago, the principles of data management remain the same as the days of dedicated servers with on premises systems. If you have only one copy of data and that machine goes down, then the data goes with it. In my experience in a business context 'the cloud' discussion is about the business' desire to expand capacity without the need for the capital expenditure needed to buy equipment and server admin salaries. By the numbers it is just better to rent instead of buy at the infrastructure level.
The cloud is a murky, ambiguity-laden concept though. Both Netflix and my 92 year old grandmother on Facebook 'use the cloud', but the former is much more sophisticated in their network and data management practices. My grandmother just wants to see fun pictures of her family and great grandkids.
That's what the author is getting at, "The Cloud" is sold as this awesome thing that will never die or break, and worse yet it's sold to people who often don't know any better.
No one realizes that the Cloud is running on the same crap we've always had and is vulnerable to the same issues as everything else. MAYBE the company is better at data management, MAYBE the employees take pride in their job and do it properly, but that's all MAYBE MAYBE MAYBE, and could just as well be "no" and you're entrusting your data to people who really have nothing to lose if it goes into the garbage tomorrow.
(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.)
The key piece that's missing here is the idea that risk is something you have to compare, and can combine in interesting ways, then trade off against costs.
There are a bunch of ways in which you can do compute, storage, and networking. You get to pick zero or more of these ways. One of them is "buy a bunch of iron and make a pile of it in your bedroom". Major risk factors here are your house burning down, you getting evicted, or there being a power cut. Another is "rent those services from an infrastructure provider". Risk factors here are much harder for you to visualise, but include things like "governments ban that company from operating in your country".
You can look at the risk of any of these options, and quantify it with an SLO, like "we intend for this compute resource to be available 99.99% of the time in a given quarter". You can then have an SLA that defines what will happen if that objective is not met, and measure how often this is complied with over time. There are lots of ways to analyse this information, but let's suppose that you can reduce it to a single number measuring how safe the resource is for your use case.
If you only look at a single option, and say "this has a safety of X", then the only thing you can get out of this effort is anxiety. This only becomes interesting when you start looking at differences between alternatives, like "the safety of servers in my bedroom is X, but the safety of buying resources on GCE is Y, so I can get this much of an improvement by spending that amount of money", or "by doing both of these things I improve my safety to Z, and I am willing to pay the additional cost of doing so". Or perhaps your position would be "this option is less safe but much cheaper and I'm willing to accept the extra risk".
The problem I have with the "fuck the cloud" article is that it doesn't do any of this. All it says is "the safety of this option is only X, you should experience anxiety". Is X higher or lower than that pile of iron in your bedroom? You still don't know.
(Realistically, unless you have the ability to build a system in your bedroom that has continental diversity for storage, N+2 of everything for hardware failure, etc, your bedroom is likely to be far less safe than the major cloud services - unless you live in a country which regularly bans American companies from doing business with you, which a sixth of the world's population does.)
tl;dr Renting remote computational power is cool (AWS), but renting remote storage is not.
I have a complete history of email archives since I started using gmail (ie cloud), but have lost years of archives from the years I managed email myself.
It turns out that companies focused on data storage and retrieval do a better job than me. And that's fine. I pay someone to do my taxes and I don't build my own furniture. Specialization is a good thing.
I think this gets to the heart of "what people value" and Jason is looking at it from a perspective of a collector. I'm also a collector so I feel much like him.
I wonder if there's a relationship between collecting and being an introvert. I have no evidence but feel like there is. I think most people just don't value "things" the way our types do. What most people value is their social life. They post pictures to Facebook not to store the pictures but to get a reaction from their friends about the picture. That's what they value. The social interaction, not the thing.
I really don't like to marginalize others by what type of personality they are. This is yet another way of putting people into buckets so that you can more easily go about your day without thinking about it much. Before facebook people would keep large collections of photo books so that when family and friends came over they could easily share them. It doesn't mean they valued those pictures any less because they were extroverted vs. introverted. People still keep hard copies of the pictures they cherish the most, like a wedding album. People value all sorts of things, but maybe they see cloud storage as perfectly secure, for the moment. Maybe personality plays into that, but I think its more about your approximate knowledge of the underlying technology that keeps people up at night.
I understand why people are upset about the word. It's misused.
But I remember what it was like before "the cloud"... You had to provision machines one by one, often via email or phone. It took hours or days. Billing was usually done by the day. It sucked.
Now you can just send a POST request to a machine and in a few seconds you have access to a new instance. You can send 1000 requests and get access to 1000 instances. And then you can send some more requests and only get charged for a few minutes of time. When this transition happened, we called it "the cloud" because it's a big undifferentiated mass of computers. We could've called it "the soup" but we didn't.
That's what it has always meant to me. I don't understand why people want to eradicate the word just because it's misused. People misuse the word "internet" all the time, but I don't think we should strike it from our vocabulary.
And that's my biggest problem with the word, and why I go to some lengths to avoid using it when talking to clients, despite a number of my employer's (and their partners') products including 'cloud' in their actual name.
No two people actually agree on what the c-word actually means. For you it's elastic compute. For others it's cheap storage, or geographical diversity, or managed RAID, or an ersatz CDN, or their hosted email or wiki or some other application, or an accounting convenience (dipping into the opex, rather than the capex, bucket), or, of course, some combination of those and others.
The biggest problems I've dealt with in IT over the years stem from people having even slightly different ideas of what words mean -- so a word that involves wildly different understandings is not a recipe for tranquillity.
Agreed. When I read the title, I was thinking "Oh, so you'd prefer to pay for dedicated servers? What a pain!".
Though, I don't think the author is upset about the word. He's just warning against services that fall within his definition of "cloud" - which is pretty fair. Losing your stuff is no good, and there's always cruddy services out there.
When 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 based on capacity, but we've had time-sharing (albeit, slightly different) for many years.
The points in this article also apply really nicely to websites and other services, many of which seem to make the mistake of outsourcing everything to other people's platforms. Oh sure, you may be using 'the cloud' to host your webmail, or your forums, or your chat, or anything else... but what if that goes missing? You're in an even worse situation than the individuals using these services to host their personal files. Remember what happened to IPBFree? They were shut down for some weird, unexplained reason (rumour has it as a raid for illegal activity), and literally everything on their servers was wiped out. Now imagine if the same sort of thing happened to one of these services, like Dropbox or the likes... Millions of people would lose most of their files overnight.
Use such services for backups, sure. But don't rely on them too much, you don't know what might be going on behind the scenes at the other end of the line. You don't know their financials (usually), whether they're under investigation for something, whether an intelligence agency is spying on their servers, whether their security is up to par in every possible sense...
And if they're offering it for free... well, they don't have much invested in keeping you as a customer when things get tough. Became unpopular recently, for saying something controversial or 'stupid' on social media? Made enemies in the political world? Then a lot of companies will be quite happy to shut down your account to avoid bad PR. By using these services, you provide a nice target for the social media mob the minute you do something that a lot of people don't like...
> like Dropbox or the likes... Millions of people would lose most of their files overnight.
That's false. Files in Dropbox are also stored locally on all your Dropbox-enabled computers. They would simply stop syncing, and you'd plug in another syncing service. If Dropbox disappears, your Dropbox folder just becomes a regular folder.
This seems unnecessarily angry. 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.
I'd love it if Facebook and Twitter had a rolling deletion period option - everything more than six months old is shredded forever, as far as the service is concerned. While people can obviously store shared photos and this wouldn't actually destroy them, I'd like that new contacts wouldn't be able to go back and look through someone's entire history. It's like a more social and longer-lived Snapchat.
> 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.
> I'd love it if Facebook and Twitter had a rolling deletion period option - everything more than six months old is shredded forever, as far as the service is concerned.
I really like this idea. The biggest benefit is that it stops people expecting these services to act like an archive. With the current system it's easy to think "Oh I can just look this photo up again on Facebook if I want to". Instead we should be treating these services as publishing platforms while we maintain separate archival versions of our data.
An approach of "delete all personal data over X days old" would actually solve a lot of those companies' data protection issues. It would also make them less likely to be hacked, since they would be less tempting targets. Why try to hack some celebrity's chat app if you know all nudie pics are deleted after X days?
Don't we keep our entire life's savings in companies aka banks that we don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand.
>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 I have for making guarantees on the decade level let alone millennia.
With that said I keep personal copies, but the authoritative copy is what's in the cloud, because its a hell of a lot more stable.
TL;DR I hear this argument all the time. The cloud isn't perfect but its a hell of a lot closer to anything I could achieve. "not invented here" syndrome won't save your data.
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 take care of their stuff is a huge blind-spot. Jason's advice is spot on in this respect, no matter what the up-time guarantees of the cloud solution you are using (and no matter what the redundancies), if you store all your data in the cloud without an off-line copy your company is 3 mouse clicks away from being history.
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.)
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.
"TL;DR I hear this argument all the time. The cloud isn't perfect but its a hell of a lot closer to anything I could achieve. "not invented here" syndrome won't save your data."
I think there is an easy rebuttal that should be considered...
First, the "nines" rating of any service or resiliency is just gibberish. Go find the statistical likelihood of money market funds "breaking the buck" or of CDS blowing up - both in 2007/2008. Those had a lot of nines too and a lot of very smart , well qualified people attesting to those nines (in venues even more serious than IT).
A highly complex system becomes incomprehensible, even to the people that built it. Those nines mean nothing.
Second, you absolutely can build something more stable and predictable than Amazon precisely because you're the one that built it - which means that it is more comprehensible and fails more predictably and gracefully.
I don't care who does the calculation and how many nines they come up with - if you load FreeBSD on two bare metal servers and put them in two different datacenters and run them with any kind of conservative and cautious sysadminning you'll have a better solution. Yes, it will be more expensive.[1][2]
The standard closure to a comment like this is to refer to Talebs Black Swan and Antifragile books ... which you certainly should read ... but even more important is "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow[3] which I hope will convince you to stop looking for complex things that never fail, and instead look for simple things that fail gracefully.
[1] ... but we have a HN-Readers discount - just ask!
What is your recourse if service level is not met? A monthly credit? Your data is probably worth more to you than the value of its hosting. Too many people rest on the laurels of SLA.
I argue frequently that the cloud causes cognitive dissonance. People want the ease of use and reliability of centralized outsourced services, but other people want data privacy guarantee and control of those services. If anything is a threat to one or the other, it's the fact we fail to understand the various requirements from distinctly different use cases.
These polarized "requirements" are usually rationalized away by each group. As a data privacy advocate, I believe that I can provide a reliable storage solution to my company without using a centralized cloud service, which then guarantees my privacy because "I'm in control". As an advocate of centralized cloud services, such as Amazon, I present that their team is better at security and reliability than any other team on the planet and that I can encrypt something and trust that my key management is secure. Both of these arguments have fallacies and assumptions.
The solution is to challenge ourselves to build better solutions. At what point in time did technology advancement ever slow down? At what point will we ever stop and say "Y'all, this here compute system is good enough and should be centralized/decentralized!"? Never, I say.
AWS 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.
I have a bit more of a nuanced view on this than Jason, but I totally understand where he's coming from and when the whole cloud gravy train started rolling our perspectives overlapped much more than they do today (and quite probably since then Jason's perspective has changed as well as perspectives do with the passing of time).
There are use-cases where the cloud is absolutely and utterly the wrong way to go about it. When you're running a bank, a government institution (ever a lower government one) or something else that is mission critical and where total control of the data and maintaining end-user privacy is paramount then the cloud is probably not the right solution.
There are also use-cases where the cloud is the right solution in principle but the wrong solution in practice because of cost. Above a certain scale bandwidth and storage costs of cloud operators will always command a premium over those you get from dedicated hosting providers.
As for 'not owning the machines', plenty of companies lease their servers, so technically they don't own them anyway.
The big problem with 'the cloud' as I see it is that companies tend to rely utterly on it and do not have a 'what if the cloud fails' line in their disaster recovery plans. Lose the cloud data and the company goes up in a puff of water vapor, which is what clouds are made of after all.
So if your use case does match the cloud solutions well then make sure that whatever else you do, have at least a copy of your critical data, code and your configuration information outside of the cloud provider. And while you're at it, make sure that this is done in such a way that there is a separation of duties with respect to those that can administer the cloud portion and those that can access those just-in-case-the-shit-hits-the-fan backups.
Just so you don't end up like codespaces did.
Finally, the cloud is not so much an end-station as it is a step on a much wider scale from absolute control with certain administrative duties on one end and much less control but great convenience on the other. Where on that scale constraints indicated by your comfort level, your application and your fiduciary duties allow you to pick your solution is something that is likely different for every company (and likely for every person).
Customers of companies would do well to research their service providers when it comes to how they are architected, just in case something goes drastically wrong so they don't end up holding the bag.
I'm definitely going to start renting my own server somewhere in Europe starting from January. I absolutely agree with everything he said and I really want to claim my own data again (run my own email server and things).
If you use Snapchat a lot, you may notice how often you get updates from people or see their public story change. Do you ever stop to think about the old snaps, or miss them? No, because you have a constant stream of new ones. You can always make more memories.
Nothing about the cloud is that different from what we had before. With shared hosting providers, you and 50 other users would fill up your disk quota on one or two hard drives on some dinky 1U server running Apache and ProFTPD. If the drives died, along with it went your data. Which is why you kept a copy on your own computer. Back then, nobody expected anyone to keep their data for them, so they just kept their own backups. The same was true for managed services and colo with the exception that you had to do more of the work yourself.
Because the industry has gotten better about preventing data loss, we get complacent and stop saving our stuff as much. But why piss and moan over more reliable, more massive services for cheap or free? Because it isn't perfect, or innovative, or more transparent?
The status quo of the industry is to reinvent the wheel, so it's hard to get mad at people for re-packaging the same solution in a different container. The obsession of holding onto all your old stuff just makes this look even more unnecessary.
As someone who has generated a pretty hefty sandbag of verbiage over my decades online, it's always amusing to see what the Grand Eye of internet arbitration decides is an incredibly important and pertinent subject to discuss in my back catalog. Whether it's my work in guiding volunteers for in-browser emulation (http://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary), my delightful coterie of 1980s BBS textfiles (http://www.textfiles.com) or perhaps my documentaries on BBS culture (http://www.bbsdocumentary.com) Text Adventures (http://www.getlamp.com) or the DEFCON Hacker Conference (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVwaIe6CiHw) ... or, as it is today, one of my many long-form written-down thoughts on all manner of this silly medium many of us have chosen to live our lives.
Oh yes, also that my cat is on twitter and has a million followers. (http://www.twitter.com/sockington) - Lots of people are loaded with knapsacks of opinion about that one as well.
I have found that Hacker News (which is, be clear, an unexpectedly lively extension of Y Combinator) is composed of several diverse groups, all with variant approaches to a linked subject. A linked subject which, as some have pointed out, I wrote 6 years ago, deep in the mists of time.
One group is literally in it for the Money, the gain, the ROI, the endless quest for the "Unicorn", and all their commentary is pungent with the bias and filter of either finding the precious gold coin at the bottom of the shitpile, or are rife with attempts to promote or play up subjects and links of great interest to their financial agenda. Be assured that I could not care less about the current status of the beating of your heart.
Another group seems to be happy to drill down as deep as they can into the mathematics, algorithms, and code of a situation, thinking that if they napkin-blart out enough "facts", they will win some sort of day. I find these people tend to be unhappy about flowery language or effusive phrasing, simply because they've left-brain-dominated themselves into deep pits of nut-sorting and bolt-counting. They use "TL;DR" a lot, as well as, I assume, Adderall. Their heartbeat status is of greater interest to me, if only because I think they are coming from a good place, even if that place smells of Cheetos and sweat.
And, of course, there are Opinion Tourists, my favorite, who might as well be equated with a loud and cantankerous pit of waving hands, waiting for the newly linked (if not newly written) event/opinion/image for their to raise in a mighty roar with a hastily cooked "hot take" on the item. Some of them even optimize the process to not even click on the provided link before the horn honking ensues.
So, "Fuck the Cloud" was written in the deep miasma of when everyone used the term "Cloud" interchangeably with "Magic"; that it was an approach and glory that would lead the experience of computing to a new shangrila. Like any old-timers rife with memories of how we got into that world (and of the echoes of cloud-dom going back 50 years), I decided to write out some of my own thoughts, especially on this attempt to dumb down the populace and separate them from not just responsibility, but control and agency with their data. I have been entirely correct in the general theme - there is a divide within the technical community, of people with admin access and the ability to control any aspect of their work, and then a very large, almost overwhelming set of users who are, essentially, meat stock. And in the same way that meat stock has no particular seat at the table when negotiations of an agricultural nature are conducted, so in the same way are the "users" left out in the cold as a whole range of abilities and ersatz "rights" are stripped away, under the guise of "ease of use" and "leave it to us".
All of this was written without the revelations of the deep, intense surveillance apparatus that is now in place, ensuring that any of this data you control or thought was within your own private space is actually destined to meet you again in an investigation, a courtroom, a warrantless intrusion or a physical SWAT attack. That wasn't even the point.
The point was that user data, treated as something to abuse, monetize, and ultimately discard as a whim, was a complete betrayal of the early promises and experimentation of the Internet. To counteract this trend, I co-founded Archive Team (http://www.archiveteam.org) and our delightful success in many areas would warrant a completely different essay itself - and it has, along with myriad speeches and presentations in the years hence.
I'm sure it might be delightful entertainment for Hacker News to find this or that out on the net and go off, endlessly, in the loop of "This Needs Me" and "Fuck You For Thinking That", but ultimately, these are ridiculous showboat-dances of "what if" and "why not", and I've discovered in the years hence that truly, actions and achievement s speak louder, ever so louder, than words.
There is no alternative approach presented here. I can only assume that the author has never had to scale a piece of software to server hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.
The implied alternative is "something you run, control, buy, administrate, and understand." Don't overthink this. You need it to scale to one (1) concurrent user.
Go buy an external hard drive. Start saving important things locally, and also automate backups to the external drive. You now have two copies of everything you can't afford to lose.
[+] [-] rietta|10 years ago|reply
The cloud is a murky, ambiguity-laden concept though. Both Netflix and my 92 year old grandmother on Facebook 'use the cloud', but the former is much more sophisticated in their network and data management practices. My grandmother just wants to see fun pictures of her family and great grandkids.
[+] [-] FussyZeus|10 years ago|reply
No one realizes that the Cloud is running on the same crap we've always had and is vulnerable to the same issues as everything else. MAYBE the company is better at data management, MAYBE the employees take pride in their job and do it properly, but that's all MAYBE MAYBE MAYBE, and could just as well be "no" and you're entrusting your data to people who really have nothing to lose if it goes into the garbage tomorrow.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] asuffield|10 years ago|reply
The key piece that's missing here is the idea that risk is something you have to compare, and can combine in interesting ways, then trade off against costs.
There are a bunch of ways in which you can do compute, storage, and networking. You get to pick zero or more of these ways. One of them is "buy a bunch of iron and make a pile of it in your bedroom". Major risk factors here are your house burning down, you getting evicted, or there being a power cut. Another is "rent those services from an infrastructure provider". Risk factors here are much harder for you to visualise, but include things like "governments ban that company from operating in your country".
You can look at the risk of any of these options, and quantify it with an SLO, like "we intend for this compute resource to be available 99.99% of the time in a given quarter". You can then have an SLA that defines what will happen if that objective is not met, and measure how often this is complied with over time. There are lots of ways to analyse this information, but let's suppose that you can reduce it to a single number measuring how safe the resource is for your use case.
If you only look at a single option, and say "this has a safety of X", then the only thing you can get out of this effort is anxiety. This only becomes interesting when you start looking at differences between alternatives, like "the safety of servers in my bedroom is X, but the safety of buying resources on GCE is Y, so I can get this much of an improvement by spending that amount of money", or "by doing both of these things I improve my safety to Z, and I am willing to pay the additional cost of doing so". Or perhaps your position would be "this option is less safe but much cheaper and I'm willing to accept the extra risk".
The problem I have with the "fuck the cloud" article is that it doesn't do any of this. All it says is "the safety of this option is only X, you should experience anxiety". Is X higher or lower than that pile of iron in your bedroom? You still don't know.
(Realistically, unless you have the ability to build a system in your bedroom that has continental diversity for storage, N+2 of everything for hardware failure, etc, your bedroom is likely to be far less safe than the major cloud services - unless you live in a country which regularly bans American companies from doing business with you, which a sixth of the world's population does.)
[+] [-] swampthinker|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wanderingstan|10 years ago|reply
I have a complete history of email archives since I started using gmail (ie cloud), but have lost years of archives from the years I managed email myself.
It turns out that companies focused on data storage and retrieval do a better job than me. And that's fine. I pay someone to do my taxes and I don't build my own furniture. Specialization is a good thing.
[+] [-] ww520|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Touche|10 years ago|reply
I wonder if there's a relationship between collecting and being an introvert. I have no evidence but feel like there is. I think most people just don't value "things" the way our types do. What most people value is their social life. They post pictures to Facebook not to store the pictures but to get a reaction from their friends about the picture. That's what they value. The social interaction, not the thing.
[+] [-] TheGRS|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|10 years ago|reply
But I remember what it was like before "the cloud"... You had to provision machines one by one, often via email or phone. It took hours or days. Billing was usually done by the day. It sucked.
Now you can just send a POST request to a machine and in a few seconds you have access to a new instance. You can send 1000 requests and get access to 1000 instances. And then you can send some more requests and only get charged for a few minutes of time. When this transition happened, we called it "the cloud" because it's a big undifferentiated mass of computers. We could've called it "the soup" but we didn't.
That's what it has always meant to me. I don't understand why people want to eradicate the word just because it's misused. People misuse the word "internet" all the time, but I don't think we should strike it from our vocabulary.
[+] [-] Jedd|10 years ago|reply
And that's my biggest problem with the word, and why I go to some lengths to avoid using it when talking to clients, despite a number of my employer's (and their partners') products including 'cloud' in their actual name.
No two people actually agree on what the c-word actually means. For you it's elastic compute. For others it's cheap storage, or geographical diversity, or managed RAID, or an ersatz CDN, or their hosted email or wiki or some other application, or an accounting convenience (dipping into the opex, rather than the capex, bucket), or, of course, some combination of those and others.
The biggest problems I've dealt with in IT over the years stem from people having even slightly different ideas of what words mean -- so a word that involves wildly different understandings is not a recipe for tranquillity.
[+] [-] whichfawkes|10 years ago|reply
Though, I don't think the author is upset about the word. He's just warning against services that fall within his definition of "cloud" - which is pretty fair. Losing your stuff is no good, and there's always cruddy services out there.
[+] [-] tibbon|10 years ago|reply
I guess the only 'new' thing that I saw was the scaling capabilities based on capacity, but we've had time-sharing (albeit, slightly different) for many years.
[+] [-] CM30|10 years ago|reply
Use such services for backups, sure. But don't rely on them too much, you don't know what might be going on behind the scenes at the other end of the line. You don't know their financials (usually), whether they're under investigation for something, whether an intelligence agency is spying on their servers, whether their security is up to par in every possible sense...
And if they're offering it for free... well, they don't have much invested in keeping you as a customer when things get tough. Became unpopular recently, for saying something controversial or 'stupid' on social media? Made enemies in the political world? Then a lot of companies will be quite happy to shut down your account to avoid bad PR. By using these services, you provide a nice target for the social media mob the minute you do something that a lot of people don't like...
[+] [-] superuser2|10 years ago|reply
That's false. Files in Dropbox are also stored locally on all your Dropbox-enabled computers. They would simply stop syncing, and you'd plug in another syncing service. If Dropbox disappears, your Dropbox folder just becomes a regular folder.
[+] [-] bradleyankrom|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roddds|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinuxBender|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cballard|10 years ago|reply
I'd love it if Facebook and Twitter had a rolling deletion period option - everything more than six months old is shredded forever, as far as the service is concerned. While people can obviously store shared photos and this wouldn't actually destroy them, I'd like that new contacts wouldn't be able to go back and look through someone's entire history. It's like a more social and longer-lived Snapchat.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|10 years ago|reply
"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
https://archive.org/about/bios.php
http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
[+] [-] bismark|10 years ago|reply
I really like this idea. The biggest benefit is that it stops people expecting these services to act like an archive. With the current system it's easy to think "Oh I can just look this photo up again on Facebook if I want to". Instead we should be treating these services as publishing platforms while we maintain separate archival versions of our data.
[+] [-] rmc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goodcall|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsfyn55|10 years ago|reply
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 I have for making guarantees on the decade level let alone millennia.
With that said I keep personal copies, but the authoritative copy is what's in the cloud, because its a hell of a lot more stable.
TL;DR I hear this argument all the time. The cloud isn't perfect but its a hell of a lot closer to anything I could achieve. "not invented here" syndrome won't save your data.
[+] [-] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
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 take care of their stuff is a huge blind-spot. Jason's advice is spot on in this respect, no matter what the up-time guarantees of the cloud solution you are using (and no matter what the redundancies), if you store all your data in the cloud without an off-line copy your company is 3 mouse clicks away from being history.
[+] [-] pjc50|10 years ago|reply
(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.
[+] [-] Spooky23|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rsync|10 years ago|reply
I think there is an easy rebuttal that should be considered...
First, the "nines" rating of any service or resiliency is just gibberish. Go find the statistical likelihood of money market funds "breaking the buck" or of CDS blowing up - both in 2007/2008. Those had a lot of nines too and a lot of very smart , well qualified people attesting to those nines (in venues even more serious than IT).
A highly complex system becomes incomprehensible, even to the people that built it. Those nines mean nothing.
Second, you absolutely can build something more stable and predictable than Amazon precisely because you're the one that built it - which means that it is more comprehensible and fails more predictably and gracefully.
I don't care who does the calculation and how many nines they come up with - if you load FreeBSD on two bare metal servers and put them in two different datacenters and run them with any kind of conservative and cautious sysadminning you'll have a better solution. Yes, it will be more expensive.[1][2]
The standard closure to a comment like this is to refer to Talebs Black Swan and Antifragile books ... which you certainly should read ... but even more important is "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow[3] which I hope will convince you to stop looking for complex things that never fail, and instead look for simple things that fail gracefully.
[1] ... but we have a HN-Readers discount - just ask!
[2] You know who we are.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents
[+] [-] spydum|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kordless|10 years ago|reply
These polarized "requirements" are usually rationalized away by each group. As a data privacy advocate, I believe that I can provide a reliable storage solution to my company without using a centralized cloud service, which then guarantees my privacy because "I'm in control". As an advocate of centralized cloud services, such as Amazon, I present that their team is better at security and reliability than any other team on the planet and that I can encrypt something and trust that my key management is secure. Both of these arguments have fallacies and assumptions.
The solution is to challenge ourselves to build better solutions. At what point in time did technology advancement ever slow down? At what point will we ever stop and say "Y'all, this here compute system is good enough and should be centralized/decentralized!"? Never, I say.
[+] [-] xenophonf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_k|10 years ago|reply
Don't move to the cloud; copy to the cloud.
Also applies to other storage media.
[+] [-] rodionos|10 years ago|reply
P.S. Can't delete Glacier Vaults for now as AWS enforces a cooling period.
[+] [-] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
That's a good thing. And in the case of Glaciers an excellent pun.
[+] [-] nickpp|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
I have a bit more of a nuanced view on this than Jason, but I totally understand where he's coming from and when the whole cloud gravy train started rolling our perspectives overlapped much more than they do today (and quite probably since then Jason's perspective has changed as well as perspectives do with the passing of time).
There are use-cases where the cloud is absolutely and utterly the wrong way to go about it. When you're running a bank, a government institution (ever a lower government one) or something else that is mission critical and where total control of the data and maintaining end-user privacy is paramount then the cloud is probably not the right solution.
There are also use-cases where the cloud is the right solution in principle but the wrong solution in practice because of cost. Above a certain scale bandwidth and storage costs of cloud operators will always command a premium over those you get from dedicated hosting providers.
As for 'not owning the machines', plenty of companies lease their servers, so technically they don't own them anyway.
The big problem with 'the cloud' as I see it is that companies tend to rely utterly on it and do not have a 'what if the cloud fails' line in their disaster recovery plans. Lose the cloud data and the company goes up in a puff of water vapor, which is what clouds are made of after all.
So if your use case does match the cloud solutions well then make sure that whatever else you do, have at least a copy of your critical data, code and your configuration information outside of the cloud provider. And while you're at it, make sure that this is done in such a way that there is a separation of duties with respect to those that can administer the cloud portion and those that can access those just-in-case-the-shit-hits-the-fan backups.
Just so you don't end up like codespaces did.
Finally, the cloud is not so much an end-station as it is a step on a much wider scale from absolute control with certain administrative duties on one end and much less control but great convenience on the other. Where on that scale constraints indicated by your comfort level, your application and your fiduciary duties allow you to pick your solution is something that is likely different for every company (and likely for every person).
Customers of companies would do well to research their service providers when it comes to how they are architected, just in case something goes drastically wrong so they don't end up holding the bag.
[+] [-] r3bl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nekopa|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterwwillis|10 years ago|reply
Nothing about the cloud is that different from what we had before. With shared hosting providers, you and 50 other users would fill up your disk quota on one or two hard drives on some dinky 1U server running Apache and ProFTPD. If the drives died, along with it went your data. Which is why you kept a copy on your own computer. Back then, nobody expected anyone to keep their data for them, so they just kept their own backups. The same was true for managed services and colo with the exception that you had to do more of the work yourself.
Because the industry has gotten better about preventing data loss, we get complacent and stop saving our stuff as much. But why piss and moan over more reliable, more massive services for cheap or free? Because it isn't perfect, or innovative, or more transparent?
The status quo of the industry is to reinvent the wheel, so it's hard to get mad at people for re-packaging the same solution in a different container. The obsession of holding onto all your old stuff just makes this look even more unnecessary.
[+] [-] textfiles|10 years ago|reply
As someone who has generated a pretty hefty sandbag of verbiage over my decades online, it's always amusing to see what the Grand Eye of internet arbitration decides is an incredibly important and pertinent subject to discuss in my back catalog. Whether it's my work in guiding volunteers for in-browser emulation (http://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary), my delightful coterie of 1980s BBS textfiles (http://www.textfiles.com) or perhaps my documentaries on BBS culture (http://www.bbsdocumentary.com) Text Adventures (http://www.getlamp.com) or the DEFCON Hacker Conference (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVwaIe6CiHw) ... or, as it is today, one of my many long-form written-down thoughts on all manner of this silly medium many of us have chosen to live our lives.
Oh yes, also that my cat is on twitter and has a million followers. (http://www.twitter.com/sockington) - Lots of people are loaded with knapsacks of opinion about that one as well.
I have found that Hacker News (which is, be clear, an unexpectedly lively extension of Y Combinator) is composed of several diverse groups, all with variant approaches to a linked subject. A linked subject which, as some have pointed out, I wrote 6 years ago, deep in the mists of time.
One group is literally in it for the Money, the gain, the ROI, the endless quest for the "Unicorn", and all their commentary is pungent with the bias and filter of either finding the precious gold coin at the bottom of the shitpile, or are rife with attempts to promote or play up subjects and links of great interest to their financial agenda. Be assured that I could not care less about the current status of the beating of your heart.
Another group seems to be happy to drill down as deep as they can into the mathematics, algorithms, and code of a situation, thinking that if they napkin-blart out enough "facts", they will win some sort of day. I find these people tend to be unhappy about flowery language or effusive phrasing, simply because they've left-brain-dominated themselves into deep pits of nut-sorting and bolt-counting. They use "TL;DR" a lot, as well as, I assume, Adderall. Their heartbeat status is of greater interest to me, if only because I think they are coming from a good place, even if that place smells of Cheetos and sweat.
And, of course, there are Opinion Tourists, my favorite, who might as well be equated with a loud and cantankerous pit of waving hands, waiting for the newly linked (if not newly written) event/opinion/image for their to raise in a mighty roar with a hastily cooked "hot take" on the item. Some of them even optimize the process to not even click on the provided link before the horn honking ensues.
So, "Fuck the Cloud" was written in the deep miasma of when everyone used the term "Cloud" interchangeably with "Magic"; that it was an approach and glory that would lead the experience of computing to a new shangrila. Like any old-timers rife with memories of how we got into that world (and of the echoes of cloud-dom going back 50 years), I decided to write out some of my own thoughts, especially on this attempt to dumb down the populace and separate them from not just responsibility, but control and agency with their data. I have been entirely correct in the general theme - there is a divide within the technical community, of people with admin access and the ability to control any aspect of their work, and then a very large, almost overwhelming set of users who are, essentially, meat stock. And in the same way that meat stock has no particular seat at the table when negotiations of an agricultural nature are conducted, so in the same way are the "users" left out in the cold as a whole range of abilities and ersatz "rights" are stripped away, under the guise of "ease of use" and "leave it to us".
All of this was written without the revelations of the deep, intense surveillance apparatus that is now in place, ensuring that any of this data you control or thought was within your own private space is actually destined to meet you again in an investigation, a courtroom, a warrantless intrusion or a physical SWAT attack. That wasn't even the point.
The point was that user data, treated as something to abuse, monetize, and ultimately discard as a whim, was a complete betrayal of the early promises and experimentation of the Internet. To counteract this trend, I co-founded Archive Team (http://www.archiveteam.org) and our delightful success in many areas would warrant a completely different essay itself - and it has, along with myriad speeches and presentations in the years hence.
I'm sure it might be delightful entertainment for Hacker News to find this or that out on the net and go off, endlessly, in the loop of "This Needs Me" and "Fuck You For Thinking That", but ultimately, these are ridiculous showboat-dances of "what if" and "why not", and I've discovered in the years hence that truly, actions and achievement s speak louder, ever so louder, than words.
Enjoy your day.
And fuck "The Cloud".
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] brennen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oldmanjay|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ninjakeyboard|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etjossem|10 years ago|reply
Go buy an external hard drive. Start saving important things locally, and also automate backups to the external drive. You now have two copies of everything you can't afford to lose.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vvpan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbov|10 years ago|reply