Do We Need To Talk About 'Cloud Neutrality'? (wired.com) 116
"A multibillion-dollar, privately-owned infrastructure is now essential to the modern internet economy," writes Wired. And if you care about net neutrality, "That should freak you out."
[T]here's an even bigger issue brewing, and it's time to start talking about it: cloud neutrality. "While its name sounds soft and fluffy," Microsoft president and general counsel Brad Smith and coauthor Carol Ann Browne write in their recent book, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age, "in truth the cloud is a fortress...." Each data center costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build and many millions more to maintain; and you pretty much can't build a successful new company without them. So, thank goodness for Microsoft, right?
The book means to portray this might and power as both a source of wonder and an enabling feature of the modern economy. To me, it reads like a threat. The cloud economy exists at the pleasure, and continued profit, of a handful of companies. The internet is no longer the essential enabler of the tech economy. That title now belongs to the cloud. But the infrastructure of the internet, at least, was publicly financed and subsidized. The government can set rules about how companies have to interact with their customers. Whether and how it sets and enforces those rules isn't the point, for now. It can.
That's not the case with the cloud. This infrastructure is solely owned by a handful of companies with hardly any oversight. [Besides Microsoft, the article also notes Google and Amazon.] The potential for abuse is huge, whether it's through trade-secret snooping or the outright blocking, slowing, or hampering of transmission. No one seems to be thinking about what could happen if these behemoths decide it's against their interests to have all these barnacles on their flanks.
They should be.
Cloud companies "are essentially incubating and hosting their competition..." the article points out.
"The problem is that few have the resources to replicate the cloud infrastructure, should the landlords suddenly turn on their tenants."
The book means to portray this might and power as both a source of wonder and an enabling feature of the modern economy. To me, it reads like a threat. The cloud economy exists at the pleasure, and continued profit, of a handful of companies. The internet is no longer the essential enabler of the tech economy. That title now belongs to the cloud. But the infrastructure of the internet, at least, was publicly financed and subsidized. The government can set rules about how companies have to interact with their customers. Whether and how it sets and enforces those rules isn't the point, for now. It can.
That's not the case with the cloud. This infrastructure is solely owned by a handful of companies with hardly any oversight. [Besides Microsoft, the article also notes Google and Amazon.] The potential for abuse is huge, whether it's through trade-secret snooping or the outright blocking, slowing, or hampering of transmission. No one seems to be thinking about what could happen if these behemoths decide it's against their interests to have all these barnacles on their flanks.
They should be.
Cloud companies "are essentially incubating and hosting their competition..." the article points out.
"The problem is that few have the resources to replicate the cloud infrastructure, should the landlords suddenly turn on their tenants."
It turns out people don't want neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
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It turns out that people don't really want net neutrality. People don't want to keep things free and neutral. They want to keep the internet filled with things they agree with. :(
Actually, people simply do not wish for company XYZ to support something they find repugnant and damaging to society. People care less about the repugnant content than they care about a company financially supporting (e.g. paying for advertisements) or benefiting (e.g. hosting costs) from said content.
If people were to get their own server and host their own repugnant content at their own cost then people generally ignore them. I mean, that's what happened to the daily stormer and nobody gave two shits th
Re:It turns out people don't want neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
TDS got their domain confiscated by registrars, despite the fact that they were not abusing the domain in any way. It was 100% political and losing a domain name is pretty damn fundamental, unless you're telling them to go and create their own domain name system. Or force everyone to use Tor.
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Sure, it was 100% political in the same way Islamic hate preachers are 100% political, yet, I haven't seen you standing up for the rights of ISIS, Al Qaeda and so forth and all the sites they've had shut down since 9/11.
It's almost as if you're just bitter that your particular brand of extremism has been hit by the same tools as the people you hate and so turned a blind eye to for the last two decades.
Most people have decided that they've had enough of hate preachers talking unhinged individuals into killin
Re: It turns out people don't want neutrality (Score:1)
Re: It turns out people don't want neutrality (Score:1)
Yes, our disputes with Islamic fundamentalists are political. Grow up and accept that.
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The Daily Stormer's domain name was NOT confiscated, that's a lie.
Their domain registrar told them they were no longer willing to provide registration services and gave them 24 hours to move it somewhere else. They did but the new registrars didn't want them either.
In fact their .com domain still works. Try it right now: http://dailystormer.com/ [dailystormer.com]
They currently have a .su domain up and running too, which it redirects to. They could actually have retained their original one with Dreamhost, who host a number of
Re:It turns out people don't want neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, people simply do not wish for company XYZ to support something they find repugnant and damaging to society.
You don't want cloud neutrality either. Your argument is the same one anti-gay people used for decades, that it's repugnant and damaging to society.
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The problem is it's not that simple, there's no such thing as absolute free speech, there never has been. Every society has limits on it, that's what American laws on libel, slander, fighting words and so forth are all about and always have been.
The idea therefore that there's ever been some absolute form of free speech where speech that is damaging hasn't been restricted is nonsense, and suggesting content that leads to people getting killed (i.e. that from far right and Islamic extremists) is equivalent t
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people are harmed by unhinged people goaded on by extremists, exactly as people are harmed by the sort of stampede that results from shouting fire in a crowded theatre.
So your standard of speech is that "if it goads unhinged people to harm others, that speech should not be allowed." Is that really the standard you want for free speech?
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FTFY.
Yes, that's their standard of free speech. That's the Constitution's standard for free speech, and that's society's standard for free speech as well. You can make the speech without being punished, your sympathizers and anyone else can repeat that speech without being punished, but you cannot force others to make
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Saying it's immoral doesn't make it immoral.
"Kicking neo-nazis off YouTube is immoral." Sure it is.
Re: It turns out people don't want neutrality (Score:1)
Censorship is freedom!! Three cheers for totalitarianism!! Hup hup hurrah!!!
Re: It turns out people don't want neutrality (Score:3, Insightful)
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It turns out that people don't really want net neutrality. People don't want to keep things free and neutral. They want to keep the internet filled with things they agree with. :(
Many people only prefer a walled garden when it is their own garden. There is latent demand for a feeling of ownership.
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Ask an iPhone user if the garden is run by strangers, or their rich friend Steve's estate.
Brand loyalty is almost always associated with a feeling of connection, it changes from "some company" to "my team."
Re:It turns out people don't want neutrality (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, IBM, and a handful of others want to you, the prospective customer, to deploy their services. The air is rarefied up there. THEY have a sense of ownership, and want to partner with you until you see the distance to the exit door slowly evaporating.
Moving to another cloud can be really difficult. Maintaining two clouds can also be an act in juggling crystal glasses. They know this. And they hope you forget about all the stuff you allocate but rarely/never use-- you'll get billed for it like clockwork.
Organizations usually have two faces, one onto the wide open and woolly Internet, and another one or their internal uses. Either can be cloud-native or in hybrid cloud, or not in the cloud at all. Spinning up cloud resources does indeed cost money, and the entrance costs to being a "cloud provider" are fairly high.
This said, there are HUNDREDS of viable cloud companies, ISPs, MSPs, colos, and other hosting schemes to choose from. Convenience drives much, as does where the Herd moves. This said, ownership, as you mention is a real concern, and it shouldn't rely on a single vendor. This in turn, disciplines portability concepts like zero trust models, and other organizational asset security structures that aren't dependent on sole-source vendors. But sloth rules, and when the herd moves, don't get trampled.
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This said, there are HUNDREDS of viable cloud companies, ISPs, MSPs, colos, and other hosting schemes to choose from.
Sure, there are hundreds, but I'm not sure how many are viable. How many are scalable in a way that's seamless to the customer? How many have robust backups, both hot and cold, and functional restore services? How many are keeping up-to-date with patches? How many make integration with a DDOS protection service like Cloudflare seamless? How many have backup power? How many have 24 hr customer service?
And how many are just reselling the big ones?
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Viable? You mean multi-international zoned, 5-9s, hot/cold, know the diff between rsynch and a dark hole in the ground, etc? The number is still in the hundreds.
Or let's go the other way, and say, how many countries do you need to be behind cloudflare?
24/7 services, too. Although some have customer service that's worthless, because they can't tell you why your k8s aren't spinning up with the SDN you wanted.
Not a lot are resellers. There are LOTS of physical sites. Don't fall for the big name marketing BS. Y
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Or IBM decides that you really need to spin up Red Hat and not that foamy Windows 2019 stuff.
They are right, that can only make your stuff better!
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know the diff between rsynch and a dark hole in the ground, etc? The number is still in the hundreds.
There may be a difference between rsync and the hole between your ears, but there is no diff between rsynch and some other file that is also not found.
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If you have a sysadmin, you already have all that stuff.
If you don't have a sysadmin, you have no idea if the people who promised you that stuff are actually delivering it.
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But sloth rules, and when the herd moves, don't get trampled.
Lets say I'm worried I might have been trampled by the cloud.
What would the symptoms be?
Does it feel like controlling my own computers? Or do I not even know it is there, because I have adblock?
Re:It turns out people don't want neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no "cloud".
You're just putting your stuff on someone elses computer.
This is an old discussion no different than SAS (software as a service), there's no real story here.
Yes cloud makes it so easy to spin up a server or datacenter that a 16 year old script kiddie can pretend to have an IT company, but at the end of the day _anyone_ can (and do) run their own IT infrastructure by buying hardware and setting up a real data center... AND that's the key thing to understand anyone can run their own data center, and even become a cloud provider.
If you want control of your IT infrastructure and not be held hostage you need to pay for it. The full spectrum from DYI datacenter to rented servers to on the cloud is available to you.
IMO any business that uses cloud only for anything other than development and testing better have one hell of a disaster recovery strategy, because anything else means putting your business in the hands of a cloud provider that could go bankrupt / get shutdown without any notice.
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but at the end of the day _anyone_ can (and do) run their own IT infrastructure by buying hardware and setting up a real data center... AND that's the key thing to understand anyone can run their own data center, and even become a cloud provider.
I have a lot of skill, and I know I can get up and running in a data center and even set one up from scratch, but I know that my skill is not high enough to match the uptime of AWS and I would have a lot of problems with hardware and provider choices I made along the way. Finding people who do have these skills is hard, because there are not many of these people.
Your point about a disaster recovery strategy is well taken, and I will be sure to review our disaster recovery strategy.
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putting your business in the hands of a cloud provider that could go bankrupt / get shutdown without any notice.
I rather doubt AWS is going anywhere soon. They're making so much money that Amazon has had to pay dividends.
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There is a cloud, and it's different to "someone else's computer".
It's not like renting a server or VPS. It's all API based. Storage has an API. Compute has an API and standard VMs that are created and destroyed as you use them.
And so unlike renting a server or VPS where you can just move the whole thing to another provider fairly easily you get tied in to the specifics. Your scripts use their APIs, your code is written for their VM environments.
So now neutrality and portability are important. You want to b
Never (Score:4, Insightful)
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I keep stuff that's important to myself on my own media and non-critical stuff with short half-life can be on a public server. And that's just my personal stuff.
But I can imagine the disaster it would be for many small businesses if suddenly the cloud services went unavailable either permanently or for a long time.
The important thing for every business should be to have a backup plan that is tried on a regular basis - like once per month.
Re:Never (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of what I do is building enterprise websites. And I don't use "the cloud".
Whenever possible, I keep things on private servers.
I did have a client who insisted his site be hosed on AWS. But that was a needless cash drain. It turned out to be much cheaper in the long run to buy a private server-class computer and hook it up ourselves. And performance was comparable... unless you wanted to pay for the very high-end AWS resources, which were expensive indeed.
Cloudflare is useful, and helps performance whether on AWS or a private server. But it's not necessary. At all.
Nonsense (Score:1)
Open cloud hardware is an issue (Score:2)
Some are designing their own hardware. You could invest a lot in optimization and then have the rent go up and have to migrate to a different architecture and spec design. You could become reliant on middleware only licensed on one platform as well.
Game developers should be wary of this as well, if game streaming becomes the norm it may be prohibitive for them to optimize for a single platform but costly if they don't and cloud vendors charge by CPU load.
The internet has always operated this way (Score:2)
People aren't setting up their own individual cross-country backbone connections; the internet has always relied on the profits of major corporations to function. It's just now we've stopped just paying for the pipe, and moved to paying for the whole stack.
So who needs the Cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is it really worth it putting your business in the cloud only to have it hacked, or be held hostage by the cloud providers themselves?
Yes it is worth it, because hosting servers in a datacenter is a serious pain.
Re: So who needs the Cloud? (Score:1)
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There is a certain scale ( less than 2k servers ) where colos are much cheaper than a cloud provider.
Thing is its the beancounter war of Opex vs Capex. Balance sheets run the world.
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Re: So who needs the Cloud? (Score:1)
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So, take a trivial 5 instance dev site, blow it up 500x
I'm not seeing this, either. What is a "5 instance dev site?" Do you mean you have 2,500 web servers serving your site behind some kind of load balancer? You can serve a LOT of traffic with that many instances.
Re: So who needs the Cloud? (Score:1)
Re: So who needs the Cloud? (Score:1)
Re: So who needs the Cloud? (Score:1)
Re: So who needs the Cloud? (Score:1)
Re: So who needs the Cloud? (Score:1)
Re: So who needs the Cloud? (Score:1)
Re: So who needs the Cloud? (Score:1)
Re: So who needs the Cloud? (Score:1)
It always comes down to choice (Score:3, Interesting)
Hogwash. (Score:2)
If your business needs the amount of computing power and bandwidth that "the cloud" can provide then you have the resources to afford your own servers. However, if you don't need such an elaborate host then you can just rent a VM from a small hosting company.
The only group in real danger are companies who have leveraged themselves in such a way that they need huge amounts of computing power and bandwidth with infrequency and cannot afford their own hardware. These foolish companies would collapse and fran
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If your business needs the amount of computing power and bandwidth that "the cloud" can provide then you have the resources to afford your own servers.
Nonsense. If you want to provide a redundant 24/7 service then you're looking at around 2 million USD per year run rate with your own hardware. The same can be achieved on a cloud platform for a fraction of that cost (around $500k with personnel cost).
You really can compete with clouds on cost only if you have extra-large workloads. And we're talking about seriously LARGE workloads.
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Where the heck did you get those numbers?
By actually participating in budgeting for such a service. First, you need at least 3-4 servers in two secure geographically distributed datacenters. Let's say it will take half a rack in each DC. This would be about $2000 a month in colocation costs alone (with average traffic cost). We can buy reasonable servers at $15k a piece, so that would just be $120k amortized over 4 years (maybe multiply it by 2 to keep spares on hand). This is all peanuts, though.
The costs actually start adding up when you consi
Re: Hogwash. (Score:1)
Stick with OSS (Score:3)
I'm working on migrating our small company from random internal systems that we've built over the years into something that can run in the cloud nicely. What I don't want to get into is any vendor lock-in. I've been successful so far in removing almost all proprietary software (it's a retail greenhouse) with the last major bit being Microsoft's BI stack. Once that's out it's all Postgres, MySQL, Jasper, and then internal code.
That lets me shop between cloud providers pretty nicely, even set up identical stacks with different companies if I really wanted to. Or, if the cloud world becomes too expensive or dangerous it all goes back in house.
Stick with Virtualization. (Score:2)
Virtualization has been a godsend (if done right) that allows migration all over the place, including local if need be.
For whom? (Score:2)
Who are you protecting with this cloud neutrality idea? Big businesses who use cloud data centers. Why do you want to protect big businesses? They have the resources to protect themselves. They can also easily get politicians to enact and enforce a few minimal rules to prevent anti-competitive behavior of cloud providers, if needed.
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Who are you protecting with this cloud neutrality idea?
Are you retarded? Customers, or consumers.
Big businesses who use cloud data centers.
Doe not matter if a consumer of a cloud service is a big business himself.
Why is there a difference between you and me and big business? Laws are for everyone!
They can also easily get politicians to enact and enforce a few minimal rules to prevent anti-competitive behavior of cloud providers, if needed.
And that obviously is what cloud neutrality is about. You are oxomor
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Your reply is very weirdly contentious. Do you often seek out opportunities to introduce hostility to completely ordinary, low-to-zero-stakes discussion topics? You might want to talk to a professional about that.
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I'm not in the professional cloud business, thank you.
Well, who's fault is it that... (Score:1)
Companies jumped at the chance to outsource all their data center activities to an outside entity in the name of cost savings (i.e., lots of lost jobs for IT people and, likely, lots of lost corporate business knowledge, too---but bonuses to upper management) without thinking much at all what would happen if the cloud-owning landlords decided to begin demanding more and m
All this is bullshit (Score:1)
The "cloud" is just content provision. As long there are options they are perfectly harmless The ISP is the only real threat that can block your connection. We have to use the government to keep it open, through competition of course. Then anybody can be a "cloud".
Yea, but.... (Score:2)
It is morally fashionable to say one doesn't care "because they were bad people", but the day that 8chan got kicked offline by a decision made internally by a totally-private company (with no legal or economic repercussions) was a watershed moment for the internet.
8chan was the canary you wanted, and the canary is dead.
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Still, it's the ISP that makes it difficult to do your own hosting from your own machine. But maybe DNS, along with the ISP, should also be declared a public utility so that nobody can be denied service.
It's called competition (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, you know what another word for "cloud neutrality" is?
It's called "competition".
I'd be more worried if there comes a time when there are not several cloud providers to choose from, at different levels of scale...
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Hey, you know what another word for "cloud neutrality" is?
It's called "competition".
I'd be more worried if there comes a time when there are not several cloud providers to choose from, at different levels of scale...
Yes, the article's breathless concerns are all really addressed by this one point: competition. And the competition isn't only between the big cloud providers, there are small providers as well, and companies can absolutely run their own data centers if they have some concerns about the cloud options.
Cloud providers provide low cost, highly-reliable and highly scalable hosting services, but there's nothing magical about them
Cloud? (Score:1)
When did the "cloud" become a mandatory infrastructure? You don't need it, you shouldn't trust anything you put there to exist tomorrow or 5 minutes from now.
Blindly putting stuff on someone else's server that you cannot even identify should be limited to things that don't matter and you could live without, so who cares if it is "neutral" or not?
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When did the "cloud" become a mandatory infrastructure? You don't need it, you shouldn't trust anything you put there to exist tomorrow or 5 minutes from now.
First off, the Powers That Be(tm) don't even think about that.
It started when CIOs stopped being technical people and instead they drew from the ranks of MBAs.
When companies burned through wage-slave admins who ran their entire infrastructure (A half- to full-rack in a colocation facility) before finding a better gig or burning out entirely.
When company management pinned their hopes on the corporate lottery that is "going viral" and "explosive growth" that they see talked about in CIO and MBA magazines (Sur
Re: Cloud? (Score:1)
Dot-com 2000 collapse was due to *lack* of clouds (Score:2)
Re:Dot-com 2000 collapse was due to *lack* of clou (Score:4, Interesting)
A very good argument can be made that the Dot-com collapse around 2000 was due to companies spending too much money on bare metal servers and having to keep them up running 24/7 at high capacity.
Nope. I was there and we were being given hardware practically for free by companies like HP and Sun who wanted to get a big hold on the market. Hardware costs were dwarfed by marketing budgets.
Re: Dot-com 2000 collapse was due to *lack* of clo (Score:2)
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I remember shortly after the Dot Bomb people selling knee-high piles of servers barely a year old for $50 each.
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No, the Dot-com collapse was due venture capitalists finally realising that the companies that they were backing had never made a profit and never were going to as they were spending money on stupid shit (see below Xmas party) and had no business plans to make money. Once the VCs stopped writing blank checks, the party was over.
I call bullcrap, there are plenty of alternatives (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, Amazon, Microsoft and Google (in that order) are the three biggest ones, and with global presence to boot, thanks to Openstack and Telcos, there is plenty of competition.
In a country as dysfunctional al Venezuela (where I am located), you have the state monopoly CANTV with a Cloud offering (I trained them on Cloud): Siruma, which means cloud in the indigenous Wayu language.
Oh, so you do not trust the state run telco? Ok, then! You have Movistar, Dycohost, Amagi, IFX, and other Venezuelan companies.
Oh, but you also want a global footprint outside of the big three? IBM, Oracle, British Telecom and GlobalCrossing (now CenturyLink) also operate in Venezuela...
And Colombia is the same, With Movistar, Claro (I trained them), Tigo (I trained them), EPM (I trained them), and others offering cloud service... And so in Mexico, with Movistar (I trained them) and others...
I guess is like that in pretty much all countries in the globe.
So, is not for lack of alternatives to the big three...
Re: I call bullcrap, there are plenty of alternati (Score:2)
Payments in Venezuela (Score:5, Informative)
Just curious, how do you get paid in a basket case country like Venezuela? In USD, EU or what? I wouldn't accept local currency.
When I trained the guys* of the state company (actually, I trained the trainers, not some regular Joes), the local currency (Bolivar Fuerte BsF/VEB at the time) was still worth my while. When I trained the people in Colombia, Mexico (and Brazil, bur for non cloud related things) the payment was, of course, in U$D.
As you state, nowadays, even in Venezuela, an independent like me will either negotiate the payment in U$D or EUR, or negotiate a payment in local currency at the exchange value of the day (with a generous padding for things like delays in payment, or the inflation). Other people use crypto, but I tend not to favour that for professional honoraries (too much volatility).
Having said that, there is a new law that puts extra taxes on payments in foreign currencies or non-venezuelan-emited cryptos, has not gone into effect waiting for the appropiate regulations**, so this may change in the future.
People on a payroll are a different issue. Some companies (a minority) pay in U$D or EUR, others pay in VEB/Bss (Bolivar Soberano) and add ad-hoc bonuses in U$D/EUR either to all people, or to key workers. Others pay in VEB only. Of the ones which pay in VEB only, some take meassures to help employees. For instance, payroll is due every 15 days. On normal circumstances, you would get your payroll + Bonuses every 15 days, some companies stage the payments so that you get payroll on days 15 and 30, and bonuses on days 8 and 22. This is an effort for the company, from a cashflow, administrative burden and logistics level, but it helps the employees dramatically.
I hope this satiates your curiosity. Any other questions I am open, but this is not an AMA. If you all have the confidence to ask, I have the confidence to say no answer if I consider it the best path.
* Is not being sexist, all of them were guys. All the girls chose other areas, like RF, networking, etc.
** The way things work here, the legislative pases a law stating the general terms of the law, for example, the surtax for payments in U$D can be anything from 5% to 25%. Then the executive writes the regulation within those parameters, for instance, they can decree that the surtax wiill be 9%. we have the law, we are waiting for the specific regulation.
Re: Payments in Venezuela (Score:1)
Unnecessary (Score:2)
Cloud datacenters have no such monopoly. If the big three (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) start doing things
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The problem with ISPs is that your local government has awarded a monopoly to your cable ISP.
You need to get a better government, then. I have at least three suppliers of fiber-optic broadband/TV here.
Regarding the military contract ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get why the US is not doing was every sane nation is doing in such a situation.
Create a joint venture where the state is 51% owner of the shares, every bidder can join, set up a shared cloud by the new joint venture.
The "winner takes it all" mentality of the US, looks pretty weird to us. In the end the tax payer would be the loser.
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I didn't want to comment, but I just had to reply to this:
Create a joint venture where the state is 51% owner of the shares, every bidder can join, set up a shared cloud by the new joint venture.
You are talking about the United States of America. The government is not supposed to doing the things that you are describing. The Federal government is supposed to be managing infrastructure, common defense, and trade between the States. The State governments are supposed to be managing infrastructure, business between individuals, and interactions between individuals.
Nowhere is it written that any level of government should engage in business acti
I'm no MBA (Score:3)
but it seems pretty stupid to depend on one's competition's remaining neutral and not screwing you.
Because The Government Can't Regulate Firms? (Score:2)
Huh? What's the argument here? The government is no less able to regulate private companies than they are the internet. They are called laws and let the government decide what is and isn't ok to do with your stuff. It's not even the case that we need new laws. These companies exercise substantial market power and an administration so inclined could use that to regulate and/or seek legal settlements requiring they offer their product on RAND terms.
Moreover, while data centers may be large and costly the
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To be clear I worry about the free speech effects but that will be a result of the cloud companies bowing to public pressure not doing something nefarious on their own.
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Yes their argument is poor, much like asking for silicon neutrality because those places are even more expensive, and necessary to a modern society.
Is this really a problem? (Score:1)
Never go full cloud. (Score:2)
Nothing more needs to be said.
What's he talking about? (Score:2)
>> few have the resources to replicate the cloud infrastructure
It's easier than ever nowadays to replicate "cloud infrastructure". Hardware is cheaper than it ever was. Networks are faster than they ever were. And nearly every single service you'd run in the "cloud" is available in FOSS form outside it. Someone who has a viable plan to take down MS, Amazon, or Google can implement that plan without too much difficulty.
Utter Bullshit (Score:2)
1) Freedom of the Press belongs to he who owns the press.
Think about that. If you choose to use someone else's press (the cloud) then you will have no freedom since those belong only to he who owns the press, and he is free to bestow (or not bestow) them on you as he sees fit. If you do not like that, you are totally free to fuck off and go elsewhere.
Your alternative, of course, is to buy your own press, after which the freedom will belong to you, and you may bestow such privilege as you want on those se
k8s (Score:3)
The answer is Kubernetes. I have seen my own Kubernetes objects successfully deploy across four different public cloud vendors, and the Cloud Native Compute Foundation will continue ensuring industry support without locking folks to specific vendors.
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The answer is Kubernetes. I have seen my own Kubernetes objects successfully deploy across four different public cloud vendors, and the Cloud Native Compute Foundation will continue ensuring industry support without locking folks to specific vendors.
Until you sucumb to the temptation and use AWS's DynamoDB, or Azure's Event Hubs, or Google's Video Inteligence API. Then is game over.
You see, cloud is not only some virtual machine where to run programs or containers (that is called IaaS), it offers also very powerfull cloud native services (most of them qualify as PaaS), and, of course, many of those are propiertary to a specific cloud. If you choose to use those services, your life is simplified, your workload runs better and faster on the cloud, but yo
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Demonstrating the importance of writing to the API and not the code. Much like web frameworks has shown details can be hidden in a transportable way.
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True - although you could argue that the "ordinary" database services have become commodities. That is, so long as you stick to the "normal" instance+disk+throughput type services, and not the funky self-scaling ones. The same has been true of "plain old VMs" for years too - you can get them anywhere (even a myriad of smaller providers can do those for you). Weirdly, storage isn't terribly portable - S3 and Backblaze are sort of interchangeable, as are the disk-based solutions that share out by NFS. Orchest