> I think this article points to a missing product in the market - integrated cloud services but with the cloud located on a private server in the home
Absolutely. But who's going to sell it to the masses? Most people don't care, as they haven't been told to - no one has sold it to them.
And who is going to explain about the erosion of privacy? Would that be Google, the government? Why, when both are beneficiaries of the existing system (ie making money for google, increasing control and monitoring for govts)? This is a market that is studiously ignored as it is in no one's interests!
Do you remember when Google piled into rss only to try its best to then kill it? When data is your business, it makes no sense to cut yourself out of the intermediation.
That's irrelevant, though. The "tech people" aren't preferring local solutions because they're funny this way - they prefer them because cloud-streamed remote apps objectively sucks. It takes some knowledge about computers to comprehend how and why exactly, but it doesn't change the facts.
(To use an analogy - doctors are a minority too, but you listen to them when they say you should vaccinate.)
> The market IS moving towards cloud. It's happened, it's happening, it will keep happening.
The important question to ask is, why. Why it's happened, why it's happening? The answer has little to do with providing value to customers - it's mostly about creating ability to seek rent. Privacy issues only happen on top of that - they're not the entirety of the problem.
> I think it's more constructive (and technically difficult) to accept that the market is heading to full cloud
Or, we could fight it. Maybe it's a quixotic quest. Maybe not. The market is a dumb greedy optimizer, it flows down the profitability gradients the way water flows downhill. If you want it to flow elsewhere, you have to put obstacles in the way, or cut out a better path.
Not OP, but: it would take for cloud services not to work this way. Regardless of whether Google is going to do anything with this data, the fact that tech-literate people aren't able to prevent just this from happening even when trying really hard makes one wonder how any one could avoid anything.
> One day running your own servers will be like running your own ISP . Massively impractical because the free market has been manipulated to the point that it effectively no longer exists
What? People use cloud computing because it already is massively impractical to run your own servers. Hardware is hard to run and scale on your own and experiences economies of scale. This principle is seen everywhere and can hardly be viewed as something controversial. Walmart for instance can sell things at a really low price because of the sheer volume of their sales. Similarly, data centers also experience economies of scale.
As someone who cares about offering the best possible, reliable user experience, cloud computing is absolutely the next logical step from bare metal on-prem servers. When your system experiences load outside the constraints of what it can handle, a properly designed app that has independently scaling microservices horizontally scales.
Even if you had the state of the art microservice architecture running on a kubernetes cluster on your own hardware, you still wouldn't be able to source disk/CPU fast enough if your service happens to experience loads beyond what you provisioned.
And there is the rub, buying your own hardware costs money, and no one wants to buy hardware they may not ever use. Another advantage of cloud computing.
You are seeing the peak of free market right now, because of cloud computing, which enables people with little upfront cash to invest to form real internet businesses and scale massively.
You think a game like Pokemon Go can exists and do the release they did without cloud computing?
> Unless the security and privacy problems of the cloud are fixed, people are unlikely to upload the kind of data required to make them comparable
You vastly overestimate people's concern over privacy and security. We still use email, http and insecure credit cards yet they have huge security and privacy holes.
People will use what appeals to them and worry about security and privacy generally later.
> This article is a good place to send people who don't understand why their ignorance plus the assertion that "everyone else does it" makes the cloud somehow OK.
I'm not sure, the article seems to have been written with a highly technical audience in mind, and those folks tend to already care more about their privacy than people who are not. Example:
> Additionally, please note that I am using a simplified term of "cloud" which refers to storing data or meta-data of us in the public cloud. I am specifically not referring to cloud-computing in terms of processing nodes that may be even stateless.
Most people are not gonna have any idea what most of the domain terms in there mean. "data" vs "meta-data"? "public cloud" vs "private cloud"? processing nodes? stateless?
Sending this to someone who doesn't care about privacy/where data is hosted, won't be convinced by an article speaking a language they do not understand.
> However, from a customer point of view any startup or mom-and-pop can leverage these very complex and expensive world-class security developments, whereas in the past this access has been reserved to the very select few that could afford it.
I don't expect startups or mom-and-pop's to build internal clouds. I do expect medium to large companies to do so. The current market turns innovations such as these into competitive advantages of Google, instead of directly exposing the innovation to the market and allowing incorporation of its advantage into anyone's product. It's a less liquid market. Either you buy all of Google's solution as a package, or you buy none. You can't pick, sort and mash a solution of your own from disparate parts.
Note that Google here is just an example. All companies of similar size in IT are doing the same, and strategically it is the correct option (for them). I'm just stating that the overall result is sub-optimal through a collusion of disparate factors.
> There's never been this many companies going after services that traditionally belonged to the cloud vendors
Interesting article.
The words 'traditional' and 'cloud' in one sentence... I can't stand that. The cloud is just marketing speak for the internet. Make it vague on purpose so you can sell the same sh!t in another package to more people. And grab all the data in the meantime.
> I don't know how your Google Voice example (which is an application/service) applies to cloud infrastructure
I tried to explain the concept above, but it's that whether it's an application/service or cloud platform, it's tooling has to be designed for the entire customer base. Often, a far stupider solution can be far more effective, if it only has to be written to apply to one use case.
> such confidence
Don't get me wrong: Nobody's perfect and everyone has security holes. But things like all of the public S3 bucket fiascos should remind you that the cloud is, by default, open to everyone, and people become incredibly overconfident that Amazon or Google or Microsoft will keep them safe.
> If it turns out the equation favors you
It almost always does. When I do something in house, I am paying for hardware, software, and engineers. When I do something on the cloud, I am paying for hardware I don't own, software I don't own, engineers who work for someone else, and a healthy profit margin for one of the five most valuable companies on the planet.
Cloud is a narrowly-effective solution for startups which can't size out their solution themselves fast enough, and short-time peak loads. For everything else, you should probably not cloud.
> The world is in need of high-quality, reliable, developer-friendly, trustworthy, privacy-guarding cloud computing platforms.
That's the thing for me: That doesn't work anymore. Privacy-Guarding destroys that. Normally, I would fully agree that this is a good vision for Microsoft, continuing to be on the Desktop (especially corporate), trying to be on other markets and failing mostly, but becoming a big cloud player. But for me, the cloud is dead, and the NSA killed it - I try not to use it if it is not really helpful and without obvious privacy issues (like http://rsspusher.eu01.aws.af.cm/, appfrog was fine for that, I still think that even if it predates that thought). And I know I'm not alone with that attitude.
Maybe that doesn't mean that the cloud is dead, rather that there is a minority for which it is. I'm not sure how to predict the influence of the surveillance on the techological future. But what it means for sure is that for me and a few other guys, a Microsoft being a big cloud player would be as dead as it was before. We will see whether that matters.
> with the reversal and soon end of Pii as a profitable method of doing business
That's wishful thinking. For as much as I resist the modernization of technology, I haven't met any average-Joes with a bone to pick over the cloud. Most people don't even understand the difference between client and server anymore, let alone how much PII they leak or what the difference between browser apps is. At best, you'll get someone who says they detest surveillance but are powerless to stop it.
The people I know wouldn't stop buying smartphones and Disney Plus if you doubled their price and removed every app and show that makes less than $10,000,000 annually. They are not going to meaningfully resist the cloud-ification of their favorite businesses. They admit they are trapped, and couldn't use a meaningful alternative if they tried.
> Expect to pay a lot more if/when the market is captive.
Yes, this is a possibility but cloud computing became a commodity.
But I see why people would pay to have their own private and unfiltered models/embeddings.
> if OpenAI isn't able to get couple hundred bucks over the typical lifetime of a computer it means the added value they provide is very low (like several times less than Spotify or Netflix for instance), meaning they'll never be “the next Google”.
They don't have to worry about this today.
> What opportunity cost?
You could utilize the money and the time spent to do other things.
> Seems like it would be risky for companies to switch to Google Cloud because it might end up in the graveyard
It's sort of a Catch-22 for them. They are this far behind in part because people fear they might not be around long term, and they might not be, because people don't want to sign up, because they fear it might not be. :)
> You'd basically need to start[1] an equivalent movement to the GNU/FOSS/Linux movement, for cloud software.
Could you point out what in any of these services actually depends on the cloud?
Email runs perfectly fine on single servers (Gmail). Network file storage is a solved problem (Dropbox/Google Drive/YouTube/various photo buckets). What these things are missing are dynamic web 2.0 GUIs, not backends. And the GUI doesn't have anything to do with the cloud.
The cloud is a huge innovation, but it isn't an innovation that provides anything for us, it's an innovation for centralized businesses. The cloud has absolutely no value until you're trying to serve millions of users on one service. Federated systems like email are perfectly capable of handling everything that the cloud does for you and I.
> As more and more services and tools are rolled into cloud provider's portfolios, I can't help but think that there's no point for me to exist
Are you thinking that everybody is migrating to cloud? For a business there is a lot of value in having their own local servers and infrastructure, even if small. Especially if they own data.
> But many companies still run sensitive software in their data centers or in private clouds, in which a company has dedicated cloud resources from a third-party or within its own premises.
(Emphasis mine)
Ok, honest question: If I have a "private cloud" on my own premises, how is that not a data center?
> 8 years ago the cloud did not effectively exist yet
Yeah it really did. I’ve been around a while. “Cloud” was becoming a buzzword around the tech industry 16 years ago. 8 years ago we had AWS, IBM, and Microsoft all vying for our business on this project.
> For most demanding customers, cloud providers have a solution called «the cloud appliance». A truck rolls in with the hardware that gets deployed as an extension of your own private cloud within a few days
None of which was as cost effective as adding more capacity to your own data centres, if you’re already running them at scale, because fundamentally someone is profiting from renting out those cloud appliances. If you have the in-house capabilities already, you can cut out the middlemen.
>As far as I am concerned, I just don't understand why people use cloud services.
Well that's the first issue. Many people have automated large parts of their infrastructure in this way so that distributing one huge file becomes part of that whole mess. The goal is of course to keep costs down to a minimum. You can actually do a lot with little money using cloud services.
But the careful balance is that you can easily miss little details. But how does that differ from any systems administration? The details are just in new areas that didn't exist 5-10 years ago.
And the details you miss are more likely to increase cost. And when you process a lot of traffic, you're popular, that can go real fast.
20 years ago in hosting we might get a porn stash on a hacked NT4 server that would draw bandwidth. And back then a whole company might have 100Mbit fiber so you'd notice.
Absolutely. But who's going to sell it to the masses? Most people don't care, as they haven't been told to - no one has sold it to them.
And who is going to explain about the erosion of privacy? Would that be Google, the government? Why, when both are beneficiaries of the existing system (ie making money for google, increasing control and monitoring for govts)? This is a market that is studiously ignored as it is in no one's interests!
Do you remember when Google piled into rss only to try its best to then kill it? When data is your business, it makes no sense to cut yourself out of the intermediation.
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