[HN Gopher] Local-first software (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
Local-first software (2019)
Author : kkm
Score : 215 points
Date : 2020-08-02 10:10 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.inkandswitch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.inkandswitch.com)
| flas9sd wrote:
| if you prefer HTML over PDF it's
| https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html
| z3t4 wrote:
| As platforms get more and more locked down (Chromebooks, Android,
| iOS) hosting the software in the cloud becomes a easier option.
| For example I'm working on and editor/IDE for programming, but
| it's next to impossible to compile programs on the platforms
| people use now a days. So in order to run a program that you made
| on your Apple phone, Android device or Chromebook, it has to run
| on a third party server...
| eternalban wrote:
| I skimmed the desired qualities, the review of current tools, and
| finally the software centric approach to achieving the stated
| goals.
|
| While we can reasonably expect software elements in any proposed
| solution, the hardware and physical elements of distributed
| computing may provide a far simpler pathway and likely will
| permit much greater reuse of existing proven software approaches.
|
| For example, all future multi-unit residences could come with
| 'data center' along with the boiler, or possibly the actual units
| will host this equipment along with their air conditioning units.
| All your cloud apps can now point to this cloud. I don't see any
| fundamental reason why 'data center' can not become a modular
| utility unit, coming in domicile, commercial, and industry grade
| flavors.
|
| In my view, the pure software solution approach to the 'modern
| informaton society' has implicit political dimensions. One of
| these is the concentrated private ownership and control over
| physical resources which are now a required substrate of modern
| society. I for one am not ready to accept that as 'acceptable'.
| sukilot wrote:
| What's the point of putting an amateur-run data center in every
| apartment building instead of using a proper one in town? Or
| instead of just putting it in my unit (with off-site backup of
| course), since a personal data center is just a single
| computer?
|
| My landlord can barely run the water and A/C; no way they can
| run IT.
|
| The improved quality and reliability is worth it for the
| trivial latency cost.
| eternalban wrote:
| You are assuming the only possible solutions require user
| maintenance.
|
| However, your implicit point regarding income level and the
| range in quality of building management is valid, and
| successful products in this space would address it.
| ozim wrote:
| There is whole bunch of reasons and that bunch of reasons has
| name IoT.
|
| I mean that security of such utility units would be roughly
| what we already see with current breed of IoT devices. To keep
| some kind of quality level of such devices there would have to
| be one big company that produces them, which does not solve the
| problem. If you look at IoT devices manufacturers now there is
| so much crap floating around because there are so many of them.
|
| I don't think it is "evil corporations concentrating power" it
| is more "normal people have better things to do". If you are
| plumber you want to spend time fixing pipes not setting up your
| homepage. Putting some ad on Facebook for a plumber is perfect
| solution.
| eternalban wrote:
| You can not possibly compare IoT -- I work in the space --
| and server as utility appliances.
|
| IoT is designed to work in extreme edge conditions: low
| power; intermittent connectivity; constrained local storage;
| limitations on embedded code, etc.
|
| Further, there is currently NO financial incentive for anyone
| to tackle the issues necessary to take these bits of
| technology and make it 'home' techonlogy. We've done this for
| all sorts of things, including controlled combustion in the
| basement for heating.
|
| You also have two strawmen here that you attack:
|
| 1 - I did not say anything about the "evil" of corporations.
| Simply that it is not acceptable.
|
| 2 - A "normal" person in a modern multi-residence is hardly
| bothered with "fixing the boiler", or "the network
| connection", or "the fire alarm system", any other utility
| tech. If you are asserting that this is "impossible" for
| "networking and hosting" (!!) please make the case.
|
| The solution space is fairly permissive, with various
| business models to consider. It should definitely be
| explored.
| oblib wrote:
| This is the 3rd time in a week a "Local-First software" overview
| has been submitted and the 2nd time it's made the front page
| here. I'm pretty surprised about that because I'm about to
| release a local-first, offline-first, option for an app I make.
|
| This article also quickly moves past "local-first" software to
| conflict resolution which, in my opinion, is a distinctly
| different issue. It's certainly not reason enough to hold off
| offering users a local-first option.
|
| At this point I believe that since it can be done it should be
| done. I'll even go so far as to say it's a necessity. At some
| point users will understand it's a necessity and demand it. All
| that really needs to happen to convince them is one big incident
| where they lose access to their data for an extended period of
| time, or worse yet, lose all their data forever, and it won't
| matter why or how.
|
| Aside from that, as more app makers start offering local-first
| options and users begin to see the benefits of that they will
| begin to demand it. That could take some time, but I expect it's
| inevitable.
|
| There are other benefits to a local-first approach for
| developers. Take a "Contacts" app for example. If we have a
| standard for saving contacts data on the client side that any app
| could access this would give users and developers options to
| create and use new apps and features that all use the same data.
|
| CouchDB & PouchDB.js provide a pretty solid and easy way to do
| this right now. Installed on the user's desktop PC, CouchDB
| provides the missing link to a robust client side web app runtime
| environment.
|
| There may be other ways of achieving this right now, but I am not
| aware of them.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Unhosted.org [1] mentions the remoteStorage protocol [2] as one
| of the options for storing user data separate from an
| application.
|
| [1] https://unhosted.org/adventures/7/Adding-remote-storage-
| to-u...
|
| [2] https://remotestorage.io/
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| How does the user switch from using database in the cloud to
| using one on their desktop?
| oblib wrote:
| Right now I just point them at a different web page.
| Basically I have a local.html and a cloud.html that call a
| different .js config file that points to either their local
| CouchDB or the one on my web server.
| akulbe wrote:
| Do you have a website where you talk about your stuff? I didn't
| see anything listed in your profile.
| oblib wrote:
| I have a personal blog where I blabbered on a bit about using
| CouchDB on the client side back in May : https://azartiz.com
|
| And I outline the features on the new site for the app at
| https://cherrypc.com/home.html
|
| That site is still under construction but there is a link to
| a demo of the app there. It doesn't run on a local CouchDB
| though, it uses the browser's IndexedDB.
|
| You only change one line of code to use the IndexedDB, the
| cloud based CouchDB, or the locally installed CouchDB.
|
| I did make a very simple demo of a "Rich Text Editor" app
| that runs on a CouchDB installed on your desktop pc though.
| After you've installed CouchDB and created an "Admin User"
| and password this page configures a user and a DB on your
| CouchDB:
|
| https://cherrypc.com/app/editor/setup.html
|
| After you created your user you're redirected to the app and
| prompted to login at this page:
|
| https://cherrypc.com/app/editor/index.html
|
| After you log in you can CRUD & print rich text documents.
|
| It's a very simple app and all the code to make it is
| included in the source of those two html pages.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| I think there's probably a market for a personal cloud, which
| probably sounds dumber than personal computer did in the 80s.
| What I mean by that is a computer somewhere in the garage, like a
| furnace, with enough compute and storage to drive all the devices
| and appliances in a house. In this model, devices do not have
| CPUs or memory, only input/output and a network chip.
|
| The way this would work is for the computer in the garage to have
| the ability to divide itself arbitrarily into VMs for each
| purpose, with an ecosystem of images designed for things like
| fridges and gaming consoles. It should be possible to add or
| upgrade compute to the device in a hot swapped fashion, and
| because it doesn't have to be in a thin tablet, it could be
| easily cooled.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I wonder if there would be market for _community clouds_ , or
| _neighborhood computes_? Imagine that a new apartment building
| comes bundled with a server room in the basement. Every dweller
| gets compute /storage there. This could serve as edge cache for
| services like Netflix/YouTube, as well as for the ecosystem you
| describe.
|
| I once imagined that homomorphic encryption would allow people
| to store data in their personal/neighborhood clouds and have
| third party SaaS code operate on that data locally. But I've
| recently been made to understand that homomorphic encryption
| would also allow companies to fully close off any access to
| data beyond what a program/service wants to give out, and
| unfortunately I get the feeling that the market will prefer the
| latter over the former.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| I would love a hardware/software solution that makes it easily
| to backup my data (ideally with integrations to Google Takeout,
| Facebook, etc.). Perhaps it exists already?
|
| Edit: of course local-first does not mean merely "backup", but
| instead the (redundant) hardware serves as a primary data
| store. I would welcome that as well!
| weejewel wrote:
| Synology NAS does this very well.
| oscargrouch wrote:
| Im doing a "browser-based something" that can mostly be reasoned
| about as a web-over-rpc-services where the primary pitch to start
| it, was exactly based on the thinking generously expressed by
| this article (albeit i had to start it much earlier).
|
| The first thing is to expect the app devs to define a api in RPC
| so that what they app serve it transparent to the whole platform.
|
| That way, users and other apps can reuse that api and integrate
| tools and other services without worrying about if the node is
| online or not.
|
| Given they are RPC (over TCP or IPC), they can be used as a peer
| node in a distributed computing flock or in the app service
| process the application can serve the RPC requests not locally if
| it wants or needs, but going over the network.
|
| But even in the case it goes straight to the "cloud" for
| resources, in the node it will always go through the RPC-api
| first. (How the application handle the RPC request is defined by
| the app developers).
|
| There are a lot of others important details actually, for
| instance the UI sdk, window management, its already there, the
| storage layer (files and key-value db) are distributed over
| p2p(torrent) and everything is accessible/bootstrapped through a
| DHT address accessible anywhere.
|
| But imagine if you had this architecture before, and Twitter,
| Facebook or Google search had to install a api-based application,
| where they need to ask you for permission to index content, or
| store locally your list of friends.. where later other apps could
| extract that information from your machine.. For instance you
| could change your search to DDG or export your Facebook list of
| friends and post to some other social network(this is actually
| the primary reason almost no one could compete with a popular
| social network).
|
| In the end, things that should be yours are yours and third-party
| apps will have to be installed and granted permission by you to
| manage that digital property.
|
| But overall i'm very glad to see that this is starting to become
| some sort of a trend, that people are finally waking up, because
| despite of all technological implications of it, it also have a
| lot of political and social benefits to this approach.
| oblib wrote:
| It's worth noting that a local-only offline-first web app shifts
| the load of storing and managing user data entirely onto the user
| themselves.
|
| That's a huge load of responsibility taken off the software
| supplier's shoulders and it eliminates the entire cost and
| complexity of building and maintaining Cloud based data
| management infrastructure.
|
| And that's a pretty great option to have on the table for both
| users and software makers.
|
| I'll also note that these apps consume almost no network
| bandwidth. With Service Workers implemented they barely speak to
| your server. The amount of bandwidth that can be potentially
| saved has got to be pretty huge.
| merricksb wrote:
| Made the front page a few days ago but didn't get much traffic or
| many comments:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985816
|
| http://hnrankings.info/23985816/
| pvh wrote:
| Hello, we've published some more work in this space -- no HTML
| version yet, but here's a more recent paper on our PushPin
| project.
|
| https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/pushpin-papoc20.pdf
|
| You can also try PushPin for yourself:
| https://github.com/automerge/pushpin/
|
| likely outdated binaries are available here:
| https://automerge.github.io/pushpin/
|
| Also, we're currently in the midst of a new project called
| Cambria, exploring some of the consequences and data demands for
| a new Cambrian-era of software here:
| https://inkandswitch.github.io/cambria/
| valuearb wrote:
| The No Spinners thing seems to be my professional niche. Every
| job I'm tasked at cleaning up a poorly performing native app. And
| it's always caused by developers writing views like web apps,
| posting their server requests as views open and fire up a spinner
| to wait.
|
| It's not that hard to have a caching strategy. And then your
| native app feels like a native app.
| asiachick wrote:
| I'll take cloud first thanks. No software to update. Nothing to
| backup. I just open a computer/phone/tablet and access my stuff.
|
| I get the tradeoffs. I'm not going back 10+ years.
| oblib wrote:
| It's actually pretty easy to integrate the two. I've done that
| with the latest version of one of my apps.
| webscalist wrote:
| TODO: build a local-first livestream remote conference zoom
| alternative software
| jeremija wrote:
| I've been developing Peer Calls since 2016. It's an open source
| WebRTC group conferencing solution, doesn't require a user
| account, has a full-mesh P2P and SFU mode (streaming through
| central server). Works on Android, iOS, Firefox, Chrome,
| Safari, latest Edge and there is no app - only a link that you
| need to share: https://peercalls.com/
| Pxtl wrote:
| For the audio side, Mumble is okay. Doesn't do feedback
| cancellation as well as Zoom, and it uses keys to auth which
| are _really_ confusing for the user (and the UI isn 't great at
| letting you switch which you're using).
|
| But I got a mumble server up and running in no time flat, so it
| works that way, and the audio quality is amazing - far better
| than Zoom - as long as everybody's wearing properly-configured
| headsets.
| worble wrote:
| You mean jitsi?
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Now with beta end-to-end encryption!
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Wasn't this Skype, originally? Pre-Microsoft acquisition?
| riffic wrote:
| skype was never open.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Everyone starts with p2p and realizes it doesn't work. OG
| skype predates fast internet and expectations of extremely
| smooth conferencing between arbitrary number of users. A
| centralised server is basically a requirement for acceptable
| performance.
| pferde wrote:
| There is a step between peer to peer and centralized, and
| that is federated. For most services, that should be the
| sweet spot.
| fastball wrote:
| How do you federate a video call with 10 people?
|
| Federation isn't needed because you don't need to have
| servers that communicate with each other, you just need
| some server that can host a given video call. So any open
| source solution works, no federation architecture is
| required.
| pferde wrote:
| The "how" would depend on how you implement it. The
| servers could determine at the beginning which one gets
| to host the call and tell all participating clients to
| connect there, or there could be some client-server-
| server-client model akin to e.g. IRC, where you would
| save some server bandwidth in exchange for worse latency
| (more hops). I'm just spitballing here, mind you.
| hinkley wrote:
| The same way people federated email forever? Local
| servers that contact upstream servers?
| fastball wrote:
| My question is not "how does federation work?" It is "in
| what situation is federation _useful_ for video
| conferencing in a way that a single open source server is
| not? "
| toast0 wrote:
| Depending on the network topology and number of callers,
| you could get some benefit from a multiple server model.
| Large meetings across offices could make use of a server
| at each office to streamline bandwidth. Not a good fit
| for today's reality of everyone from home or your
| scenario of 10 callers. Could still be useful for EU vs
| US callers to connect locally and only one stream across
| the atlantic. Multiparty e2e calling is already
| challenging, and adding multi-hop routing might make it
| more so, though.
| hinkley wrote:
| Restatement of the other responder:
|
| You put a repeater on (at least) one side of every
| bottleneck to remove redundant traffic.
| sukilot wrote:
| What does the server do that the callers can't? Compress
| video?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| It condenses the video streams so each participant
| doesn't need streams directly from every other
| participant. Also helps with NAT punching.
| amelius wrote:
| But we still need a catchy name.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| What's the origin of the "X-first" language pattern? Earliest
| example I cam remember is when Eric Schmidt was talking about
| "mobile first" approach.
| zurfer wrote:
| Nice question. I am not that old and only further aware of the
| more recent "cloud first" and "america first"
| wilsonrocks wrote:
| How about a more generalised collaboration system, where you just
| edit your files lot Cally as standard, but can kind of dial in
| using o collaboration - a bit like a screen share on a call. So
| suddenly the people you've dialled can leave comments on your
| work etc, but when you cut the connection, they can't any more?
| jjordan wrote:
| This is why I'm a frequent visitor to /r/selfhosted. Any other
| self-hosted centric communities to be aware of?
| ffpip wrote:
| Maybe r/datahoarder ? Or even r/opendirectories ,r/plex ,
| r/homeserver ?
| Natalie1Quinn wrote:
| How to make money online without investment in home,earn Money on
| blogging, earn Money on Fiverr,make money writing online,How can
| I make money online fast and easy without investment,how to earn
| money online without paying
| anythinghttps://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/06/free-marketing-
| tools.htm...
| AriaMinaei wrote:
| > ... cloud apps depend on the service continuing to be
| available: if the service is unavailable, you cannot use the
| software, and you can no longer access your data created with
| that software. This means you are betting that the creators of
| the software will continue supporting it for a long time -- at
| least as long as you care about the data. Although there does not
| seem to be a great danger of Google shutting down Google Docs
| anytime soon, popular products (e.g. Google Reader) do sometimes
| get shutdown or lose data, so we know to be careful.
|
| Plus, the value of the cloud app is not just your data, but the
| network effects. Like, if you've emailed links to a GDocs
| document, and 5 years later you decide to move to another
| service, those GDocs links will 404, regardless of whether you've
| transferred all of your data to the new service.
|
| With local-first apps, the URL starts with _you_ , not some
| _some-sass-provider.com_.
| flarg wrote:
| If you're emailing links to Google docs and you expect them to
| last for 5 years then you're doing it all wrong. Google Docs
| are great for collaboration, authoring, review, publication,
| but durable publication or archiving is a different use case
| that only a permanent, self managed, URI based solution can
| deliver. I guess that's part of what you're alluding to.
| elmo2you wrote:
| Many far smarter people have said this before, far more
| eloquently than I can, but in short:
|
| Cloud Computing (and SASS even more so) is little more than
| just another attempt to recreate access/info monopolies,
| essentially the same profit proposition as existed with closed
| source software, while pretending to be one of the cool kids
| and use politically more acceptable (but in this context rather
| meaningless) terms like Open Source and Open Standards. It may
| be a different generation of companies, with slightly different
| cultures, but they are all equally predatory in nature as the
| old ones.
|
| It's going to be a rude awakening, when some of the bigger
| service providers will eventually fall over (which they will).
| Of course, everyone will blame anything and everything but
| their own willful ignorance, when that happens.
| scarface74 wrote:
| What do you propose? That every company reinvent the wheel or
| host everything locally even if it's not their core
| competency? Every company has to decide what its "unfair
| advantage" is and concentrate on that.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| What's wrong with hosting software locally and buying 3rd-
| party support for the stuff that's "not core competency"?
| It eliminates a single point of failure.
| scarface74 wrote:
| >What's wrong with hosting software _locally_....it
| eliminates a _single point of failure_.
|
| I'll let that just sit there.
|
| But you are going to host your own project management
| software? Your own expense reporting software? Your own
| email server? Your own payroll processing? Salesforce
| equivalent? Your own git server? Dropbox equivalent?
| encom wrote:
| Why not?
| gav wrote:
| Short answer: generally it costs more money for worse
| results.
|
| Longer answer: doing things in-house that are outside
| your core competencies and/or value creation model is a
| poor use of scarce resources (both capital and human--
| predominantly management bandwidth) and increases risk
| carried.
|
| To give a concrete example: imagine you need to host your
| source code repository. You can pay for something like
| Bitbucket for $6/month/user and not have to worry about
| it. It's a price that scales linearly with your team size
| and is a tiny fraction of their total cost.
|
| Doing it in-house: you have to pay for hardware, storage,
| worry about backups, have somebody support it, have
| somebody manage the person that supports it, deal with
| users, find a solution to remote access, and so on. But
| all these miss the big cost--risk--what happens if the
| server dies or your office burns down? Nobody used to get
| fired for buying IBM, nobody now gets fired for buying a
| popular SaaS product.
|
| You aren't Google, at some point scale changes the
| equation, but that's a rare spot to be in.
| toast0 wrote:
| At my last job, we hosted our own git repo with gitolite.
| That doesn't give you a ticketing system of course, but
| it was fairly easy to administer. And it sat on a
| miscelanous jobs server we already needed and didn't use
| up too much resources.
|
| Remote access followed production norms, so no extra work
| there (other than a lot more people need access to git
| than other production servers). Maybe a few hours one
| time to lock down permissions for git etc, probably less
| fuss than getting SSO setup for a git SaaS.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Now repeat that for your mail server, your expense
| tracking system, your HR system, your project manager
| system, various collaboration software....
|
| And what happens when that one server goes down or
| becomes overloaded?
| toast0 wrote:
| Some of these are better to outsource than others. Mail
| probably needs more active upkeep, but you could more
| easily block links to reduce spear phishing if you were
| running it yourself. Expense tracking needs detailed
| knowledge of accounting to ensure only proper expenses
| are approved (possibly by an outside consultant) I don't
| even know if there are low cost software options here. HR
| systems (includes payroll?) is also specialized and high
| effort and not core competency.
|
| I've got opinions on collaboration software (why not put
| text files in git), but ignoring that, I don't really
| want to run a wiki, so sure, maybe your email provider
| offers something anyway.
|
| > And what happens when that one server goes down or
| becomes overloaded?
|
| You fix it? Same like when production breaks; hopefully
| you have people who can fix production, hopefully you
| monitor your important tools. What happens when it gets
| overloaded and its outsourced? You hope your provider
| fixes it, and you call and yell at them.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > You fix it? Same like when production breaks; hopefully
| you have people who can fix production, hopefully you
| monitor your important tools. What happens when it gets
| overloaded and its outsourced? You hope your provider
| fixes it, and you call and yell at them.
|
| Well, in my case. I just clicked on "minimum" and
| increase it by 1 in my autoscaling group or I scale
| vertically and change the server from 2xlarge to 4xlarge.
|
| Can you get another server shipped to your colo in 5
| minutes, brought online and roll over and go back to
| sleep? Like I did at my last job. Most of the time by the
| time the notification alarm woke me up, scaling has
| already taken place.
|
| But, depending on the service, part of "monitoring" is
| bringing up another server automatically when CPU usage
| spikes.
|
| But I think my current employer knows just a little about
| managing servers/services at scale. As far as I know, my
| current employer manages more servers than anyone else on
| the planet and has more experts on staff than anyone.
|
| Even that being said, _we_ outsource a lot of the
| services that aren't in our core competencies to other
| companies.
|
| I couldn't say that about my previous employer who had 50
| people in all.
| scarface74 wrote:
| A) are you willing to spend the money on servers and
| staff to maintain it?
|
| B) would it have the same reliability characteristics?
|
| C) do you have a DR strategy?
|
| D) after you spend all that money, did it help you either
| save money or make money? Did it give you a competitive
| advantage? Did it help you go to market faster?
| jasode wrote:
| _> It eliminates a single point of failure._
|
| When Netflix previously owned and managed their own
| datacenters, they had a massive 3-day database outage[1]
| that disrupted shipping DVDs to customers. Even though
| they are a Silicon Valley tech company and built their
| own datacenter competency with internal staff engineers,
| it didn't prevent that major failure.
|
| Based on interviews with Reed Hastings and Adrian
| Cockcroft, they said the 2 big reasons they migrated to
| AWS was (1) the pain of that 3-day outage and (2) the
| future expansion plans into international regions. They
| didn't want to buy more datacenters and manage that extra
| complexity. Reed said, _" they wanted to get out of the
| datacenter business"_.
|
| Yes, AWS/GCP/Azure all have outages too but Netflix (and
| other customers) conclude that -- as a whole -- those
| cloud vendors will be more reliable than in-house
| solutions. The cloud vendors also _iterate on new
| features faster_ than in-house staff -- especially for
| non-tech companies like The Guardian newspaper.[2]
|
| Some big companies such as Facebook, Walmart, can employ
| an army of IT staff with the skills to maintain complex
| "private clouds". However, most _non-tech_ companies
| found out that internal clouds were an inefficient way to
| spend money on IT because it wasn 't their core
| competency. Just because a raw racked server installed
| on-premise is cheaper than EC2 doesn't mean the TCO
| (Total Cost Ownership) is cheaper.
|
| [1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-
| the-net...
|
| [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160319022029/https://ww
| w.compu...
| AriaMinaei wrote:
| I think you are jumping to the "What do you propose?"
| question before understanding the pain point first.
|
| You are asking for a solution before agreeing that there
| exists a problem.
|
| This is the "I'll listen to your problem if the solution is
| convenient" mentality. It's inside-the-box thinking. It
| holds you back.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The opposite of depending on another company to host a
| service is to host it yourself. The average company of
| any size has at least a dozen external SAAS dependencies.
| Do you want to have the expense of managing all of those
| services yourself?
| mynegation wrote:
| Anecdote, but here is a specific situation. Company X has
| both internal cloud (based on OpenShift) and "public"
| cloud (Y: one of the big three cloud providers).
| Application team Z has applications on both, for
| historical reasons. One of these days application on the
| internal cloud fails, remediation requires attention from
| X's infrastructure team (which is not the same and quite
| removed from application team), situation is dragging for
| hours initially and repercussions are cleaned up for
| several days afterwards. Business is losing money and is
| furious. Similar situations happens on a public cloud,
| application team gets a tech resource from Y calling back
| in two minutes and the whole situation is resolved in two
| hours.
|
| The immediate costs are only part of the picture.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It goes both ways.
|
| There have been times that the control plane blew up in
| one zone of one cloud provider.
|
| I had a least-complexity system which lived in that zone
| so it kept functioning as if nothing happened.
|
| Other people panicked or had their automation freak out
| for them, they tried to restore their multi-AZ systems,
| overloading the control plane for the whole region.
|
| It's a stressful experience if you feel you can't do
| anything about it, and sooner or later you will feel it
| with cloud computing: periods of 8-12 hours where your
| environment is FUBAR and you are best having some faith
| they will stitch it back together and walk away from it
| for a while.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The difference is...
|
| If my colo goes down. My customers are going to complain
| and think I am incompetent. If my cloud hosted
| infrastructure goes down and everyone else is down your
| customers are a lot more understanding.
|
| "No one ever got fired for buying IBM"
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| That's the easy part.
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| What is "The average company of any size"?
|
| It depends on what you want but managing complex software
| may be expensive and has some serious economies of scale,
| which makes a pressure to outsource, even expensively.
| You can't just brush it off with 'that's easy', it's not.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Really? Have you taken into account the fully allocated
| cost of the employee to manage it and the hosting cost?
| Do you have a DR strategy?
| z3t4 wrote:
| There is a third option: Let someone else host it. Having
| only one supplier is a monopoly. But if many companies
| compete about serving customers, you can choose the company
| with the best service, or if you prefer - the lowest
| prices.
| scarface74 wrote:
| No one company provides all of the services that the
| typical corporation needs.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Cloud Computing (and SASS even more so) is little more
| than just another attempt to recreate access/info monopolies,
| [...] , everyone will blame anything and everything but their
| own willful ignorance, _
|
| For some reason, _" cloud computing"_ has become a bogeyman
| and therefore corporations paying for it are clueless
| "sheeple".
|
| To help prevent the phrase "cloud computing" from distorting
| our thinking, we have to remember that companies have been
| paying others for _off-premise computing_ without calling it
| "cloud" or "SaaS" for _decades_ before Amazon AWS,
| Salesforce, etc existed.
|
| Examples...
|
| In the 1960s, IBM's SABRE[1] airline reservations system was
| the "cloud" for companies like American Airlines, Delta, etc.
|
| In the 1980s, many companies used to process payroll in-house
| accounting software and print paychecks on self-owned dot-
| matrix printers. But most companies eventually outsourced all
| that to specialized companies such as ADP[2].
|
| Companies tried to manage employees' retirement benefits on
| in-house software but most outsource that to companies like
| Fidelity[3]. Likewise, even companies that self-fund their
| own healthcare benefits will still outsource the
| administration to a company like Cigna[4]. Don't install a
| bunch of "healthcare management software" on your own on-
| premise servers. Just use the "cloud/SaaS" computers that
| Cigna has.
|
| Some companies (really old ones) used to print their own
| stock ownership certificates and mail them out to grandma.
| Now, virtually every company outsources that to another
| company. Most companies that have Employee Stock Purchase
| Plans outsource the administration of it to a company like
| Computershare[5].
|
| The major difference with "cloud" terminology taking hold is
| that services like AWS is offering _generic_ compute (EC2)
| and _non-vertical_ industry solutions. Otherwise, the so-
| called "cloud" has been going on for _decades_. Amazon AWS
| made "cloud" really convenient by allocating off-premise
| resources via a web interface (dashboard or REST api) instead
| of calling a salesperson from IBM/ADP/Fidelity/Cigna/etc.
|
| That doesn't mean it's always correct to buy into everything
| the cloud offers. Pick and choose the tradeoffs that make
| financial sense. Netflix got rid of their datacenters and
| moved 100% of the customer billing to the cloud. But Dropbox
| did the opposite and migrated from AWS to their own
| datacenter. They're both correct for their situations.
|
| _> , when some of the bigger service providers will
| eventually fall over (which they will)._
|
| The big established vendors like AWS, Azure, and GCP ... all
| have enough business that they will be around for decades. If
| anybody will exit, I'd guess it would be the smaller players
| like Oracle Cloud.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)#His
| tor...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADP_(company)
|
| [3] https://www.fidelityworkplace.com/
|
| [4] https://www.cigna.com/assets/docs/business/medium-
| employers/...
|
| [5] https://www.computershare.com/us/business/employee-
| equity-pl...
| kortilla wrote:
| None of your examples would disrupt the core business from
| functioning (barring the huge reduction in reservations
| from SABRE but that's a monopoly exchange, which is a
| different problem).
|
| Disrupting paychecks, retirement, healthcare, stock
| issuance, etc were all annoying but the business would not
| cease to make money and those were all relatively
| interchangeable with other providers or had offline
| alternatives.
|
| The key difference with this current cloud embrace is that
| big billion dollar businesses are making their core
| business dependent on Amazon/Google/Microsoft cloud
| services. They don't even trust power companies or ISPs to
| give them power and Internet that reliably.
|
| A disaster recovery plan for a dependence on AWS lambda and
| co. is now just "Amazon shouldn't fail, but if it does
| we'll just have to rewrite all of that software at great
| expense and lost revenue to the business."
| jasode wrote:
| _> The key difference with this current cloud embrace is
| that big billion dollar businesses are making their core
| business dependent on Amazon/Google/Microsoft cloud
| services._
|
| There's still some history missing there. Before
| AWS/GCP/Azure, billion dollar businesses were making
| their _core_ business dependent on datacenters owned by
| HP/IBM/Sungard/Origin/Exodus/etc. E.g. Google's early
| search engine (their core business) in 1999 ran on
| servers at _Exodus_ datacenter. Many of The Washington
| Post 's core computing was provided by IBM's data center
| before Amazon AWS existed. In the 1990s, many businesses
| also had SAP ERP for core business processes that was
| managed by outsourced datacenters. (Both HP and IBM
| offered "managed SAP" hosting services.) When SAP went
| down, manufacturing lines got _shut down_ , or no
| products got picked for shipping and trucks would sit
| idling. It's a similar disruption with AWS outages today.
|
| Therefore, switching from lesser known and older "cloud"
| such as Origin/Exodus/etc to AWS/Azure/GCP is not that
| radical or as dangerous as some believe. Before AWS, many
| companies still depended and trusted other companies to
| provide _off-premise_ reliable computer infrastructure.
| We just didn 't call it _" cloud"_ back in the 1990s.
|
| Today's AWS/Azure/GCP with their modern multi-zone
| failover architectures are _more reliable_ than the old
| HP /Origin datacenters that businesses used to depend on.
| toast0 wrote:
| Exodus and similar colocations aren't really the same
| thing. They're selling you rack space with connectivity,
| you bring the servers. If you outgrow that, or they go
| out of business, you 'only' need to get connectivity to a
| new facility and drive your servers across town.
|
| If you outgrown IBM/AWS/etc, you need to get connectivity
| and servers and run any services you were relying on.
| That's a lot bigger dependency.
| zaphar wrote:
| While you _can_ bring your own servers most of the time
| you rent those servers from them. You do this so that you
| can get fast turnaround on warranty replacements or
| repairs. You can use on-site hardware support and you get
| a lot of other benefits. When you think about it it 's a
| lot like AWS except AWS offers those benefits even better
| than the old school places.
|
| You _can_ have your own servers but it 's at the cost of
| slower turn around on hardware issues.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's a very good point, thanks for bringing it up, with
| all the examples to back it up.
|
| I agree that "cloud" is becoming a thought-terminating
| cliche (and I myself fall prey to reflexive reactions to
| that word all too often). I think the core issue is
| something different - it's about _relationships_. It 's a
| point of view I've been exploring recently, and I find it
| to be illuminating. Some thoughts:
|
| 1. Individuals do not handle relationships as well as
| companies. That's the source of "subscription fatigue" -
| you end up having to mentally keep track of all the third
| parties you may or may not owe money to, that may or may
| not do something that impacts your life down the line.
| Companies have dedicated people and processes for handling
| this, most individuals do not (rich people can hire help).
|
| 2. Individuals do not necessarily _want_ all these
| relationships. If I buy a toaster, I don 't want _any_
| relationship with its maker[0] - for the same reason that
| when I buy bread from a grocery store, I don 't want to
| enter into relationship with the seller, or the baker, or
| the farmer that provided the flour[1].
|
| 3. Power imbalance in relationships matter. Individuals are
| almost always irrelevant to the service provider, so for a
| regular person it's better to not have any relationship at
| all. For companies, it depends. A corporation like
| Microsoft or Google can be rather certain that Salesforce
| isn't going to pull a fast one over them, due to relative
| sizes and the amount of money changing hands. Smaller
| companies fall somewhere on the spectrum between
| individuals and megacorps.
|
| 4. The above colors risk calculation. If my relationship
| with the service provider is closer to that of peers, I can
| feel safer about depositing data with them or making myself
| dependent on their service, because they're incentivized to
| provide a good service to me, and I can hurt them if they
| don't (say, by switching to a competitor). Companies do the
| same calculus. A small studio is best to think twice about
| depending on third-party services for anything that may
| outlive such services. A large company can derisk the
| relationship through a contract.
|
| 5. Part of the objection I and many others have to SaaS is
| that consumer-oriented SaaS (including "stuff as a
| service", aka. turning products into services) tends to be
| exploitative by design. You wouldn't consider a friend a
| person that abuses you mentally or tries to cheat you out
| of your money, so why enter into a relationship with a
| company that tries the same? Except when you have no other
| choice, which is why everything becoming a service is a
| worrying trend.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Beyond the one managed by consumer protection laws.
| But this kind of relationship is something you do not need
| to mentally keep track of - it doesn't come with any
| unexpected consequences, and the terms of relationship are
| shared (they're part of the law).
|
| [1] - Again, beyond the implicit ones fully handled by
| consumer protection and health&safety laws.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Point 1 interests me because I have seen it play out.
|
| I work for a small unit of a large organization now and
| we have a highly formal process for buying SaaS
| subscriptions. You fill out some paperwork explaining why
| you need it, in 1 to 2 weeks you tend to hear it is
| approved or (best of all) the large organization has a
| site license already they can put you on.
|
| You have to have some brakes on subscriptions.
|
| I worked at a small co where we had maybe 20-30 different
| SaaS tools that we stored "documents" in. Every week we
| had an all hands and somebody would bring up the problem
| that they can't find documents and that the answer is
| that we need to have a new place to put documents.
|
| The group seemed impervious to the obvious objection that
| having more possible places to put documents would make
| it harder to find documents. So we wound up with a lot of
| SaaS subscriptions, a lot of talking, but very little
| listening.
|
| The obvious business response that to problem is to build
| "one ring to rule them all"; e.g. a small instance of the
| thing that the n.s.a. uses to read your email, sans the
| cryptoanalysis bit.
|
| That's an astonishingly hard sell. On one hand that
| system is an existential threat to all SaaS vendors from
| Salesforce.com to the very smallest. So you know you'll
| get resistance.
|
| Even though Google is great at making money from ads, the
| search is not impressive in 2020. (Look at the second
| page of results, then the third, and ask "why do they
| bother showing any of this crap?") Corporations still buy
| OpenText. Ask people what is a scalable full-text search
| engine and they say "Solr" (have you really seen how it
| executes queries?) The only full-text search I like these
| days is pubmed.
|
| We can do better.
| m3047 wrote:
| As partly a philosophical exercise, and partly as hyperlocal "no
| really, you are here so you have access", I added Apache with DAV
| and Etherpad to a DNS+DHCP "sled":
| https://github.com/m3047/pangolin
|
| The irony that Etherpad is written in Node is not lost on me.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Unfortunately local-first software is incompatible with you being
| a slave to your preferred technology company of choice (Facebook,
| Apple, Google, Microsoft).
|
| If it wasn't for GDPR, most of these companies wouldn't even
| offer exports of your data.
| scarface74 wrote:
| And now with GDPR I have an annoying "we use cookies" splash
| page every time I visit a web page. Win???
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Those are not actually compliant with the regulation - it
| explicitly forbids annoying/confusing/forced consent prompts.
|
| There is a problem with the lack of enforcement, but the
| regulation itself is sane.
| scarface74 wrote:
| So the end result was that it wasn't effective. Imagine
| that, ineffective government regulations with regards to
| tech. Who would have thought?
| erinnh wrote:
| So the end result should be that we dont try?
| scarface74 wrote:
| More regulation actually increases the barrier of entry
| to make it even harder for new companies. Well financed
| established companies are well able to comply. There is a
| reason that FB always begs for regulation.
| erinnh wrote:
| If the barrier to entry is "don't be a dick and sell data
| to whomever you like without telling your customers",
| it's kinda a good barrier, or not?
|
| Regulation isnt a black and white/good or bad thing. It
| can be either.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Think about a regulation being passed that says if you
| allow user generated content, you must have a system in
| place to prevent copyright infringement. Would a startup
| be able to design such a system? It would give FB and
| Google an advantage.
| erinnh wrote:
| I already said that its not black and white? I dont know
| why youre trying to argue as if Im saying all regulation
| is perfect?
|
| But acting as if all regulation is terrible and we should
| let the massive corporations simply walk over us is also
| not realistic.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Do you trust the government to know the difference?
|
| The US House just had a dog and pony show with the tech
| CEOs where one representative asked Zuckerburg about
| _Twitter's_ content policy.
| erinnh wrote:
| Much more than any company that often are headed by
| literal psychopaths. At least I can vote for my
| representatives.
|
| And considering a lot of regulation that is passing in
| the EU I think is at the very least a good step in the
| right direction, I would say its going pretty well.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > Much more than any company that often headed by literal
| psychopaths...
|
| Do you know who our President is?
|
| (flagged in 5...4...3...2...)
| henvic wrote:
| GDPR was born yesterday, and government intervention on such
| private matters can really cause a disaster. You want to have
| control over your data, and just to cite one case, Apple has
| started embracing it a while ago ahead of GDPR laws. Perhaps
| because it is a hardware company it has more incentives (like,
| it could very well create something akin to a 'family vault'
| that would be a fancy digital vault that you could buy and
| store your family data on it, and it would survive even fires -
| just thinking some crazy ideas, so don't judge me too much).
|
| I am positive that market forces would achieve the same effect
| sooner if it were not by GDPR. One thing that has to change in
| my opinion is the idea of 'exporting out'. People should be
| using such services to import in what they have to share with
| others, instead of blindly relying on them to access remotely.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Unfortunately in the real world, noone writes about the
| Honeywell basic-ass wifi AC controller but instead jizzes
| themselves over the Google Nest "with AI" which I will find
| time to write an extension that replaces "with AI" with "with
| if statements" sometime this century.
| marcinzm wrote:
| It's pretty common for up-an-coming players in a market to
| push for interoperability and then once they have dominance
| to shut it down. This happening is not proof that GDPR isn't
| needed as such measures only cover a small fraction of the
| market at any given time.
| Frost1x wrote:
| >I am positive that market forces would achieve the same
| effect sooner if it were not by GDPR.
|
| Considering how many business practices across the board
| aren't very consumer friendly and are seemingly growing ever
| more anti-competitive in nature while skirting antitrust
| definitions in grey areas, I'm personally not nearly so sure
| we can rely on "market forces" to protect anything but the
| business in question.
|
| In fact, the only thing I've seen market forces achieve is
| self-preservation and interest which may or may not align
| with the rest of what society wants or needs.
| Proven wrote:
| Apple doesn't have a relationship with the rest of society
| and doesn't need to cater to it. It has a relationship with
| its customers and each side can exit the relationship.
| That's much preferred to the GDPR nonsense and associated
| costs. If that doesn't suit you, don't use Apple.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Netflix is always the perfect example against this weird logic.
| They commited to AWS, and stuck with it even after Amazon
| itself is one of their prime competitors. They clearly decided
| that infra and devops is not their core competency and have
| absolved themselves of that responsibility and are ready to pay
| a premium for it.
|
| On the other side we have people who keep patting themselves in
| their back about their Emacs setup being able to run a web
| server from a raspberry Pi.
|
| We're at a place where it's fairly counter intuitive to
| continue arguing against cloud providers. I doubt azure or AWS
| are going to go down with a probability that should worry any
| business (and even then it should be recoverable). The only
| danger with cloud providers is that if your engineering team is
| not exactly smart you can rack up a million dollar bill for a
| dog walking app. But thars more about your ability to recruit
| disciplines engineers, no point blaming it on the cloud.
|
| Look at Imgur. For the most part bootstrapped, scales extremely
| well, and if I'm not wrong, is very frugal, also runs off AWS.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| > doubt azure or AWS are going to go down with a probability
| that should worry any business
|
| Were you asleep when S3 East failed to the point that half of
| the internet was offline or did you just not get a
| notification?
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/
|
| > The only danger with cloud providers is that if your
| engineering team is not exactly smart you can rack up a
| million dollar bill for a dog walking app
|
| The public cloud has never been recession tested and these
| next few years may be the only way to do it. The model works
| as long as there are people willing to pay for Amazon and
| Azure will raise prices if the base load drops below a
| certain point.
| scarface74 wrote:
| And that half of the internet decided that it wasn't worth
| it to have multi region redundancy. I'm not saying that was
| a bad decision. It all depends on how much they would lose
| in an outage vs. cost.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| This also includes AWS because they stored the images for
| the dashboard in S3 East.
| sukilot wrote:
| Houses catch fire/flood/tornado too. The question is
| overall SLI, and multihoming, not has there ever been an
| outage.
| iagovar wrote:
| Just for being that guy: AFAIK Netflix has some caching
| devices that were pretty much home baked with FreeBSD and
| some other goodies. Can't remember the name, but I know they
| sit them in exchanges directly to ISPs. IIRC they were only
| using AWS for storing content with low frequency access.
| scarface74 wrote:
| They use AWS for much more than just "storing content". You
| can read about all they do on AWS just by reading their
| blog and watching some of their ReInvent presentations.
| lioeters wrote:
| Here's a list of Netflix blog posts about AWS.
|
| https://netflixtechblog.com/tagged/aws
| smithssoso wrote:
| Take a look at the PJON protocol that is a perfect example of a
| local-first networking technology, I am really amazed by the job
| they did on that! https://github.com/gioblu/PJON
| staticvar wrote:
| Was this paper in a journal?
| cxr wrote:
| It was published in the proceedings for _Onward! 2019_.
|
| https://doi.org/10.1145/3359591.3359737
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(page generated 2020-08-02 23:00 UTC)