Fuck the Cloud

Jason Scott, article author here.

I must say, I'm impressed; the comments on here don't really descend into the ad hominem, design crazy, check-out-how-hardcore-geek-I-am mess it did over at reddit.

By link bait, I assume you mean for attention instead of money, since I don't do adwords/banners or stuff like that. In that definition, guilty as charged. A lot of it is to just knock people out of the safety zone of thinking of services they don't pay for and just "use", as being their big ol' buddy. And to not fall for "cloud computing" things like software rental, all-actions-on-web and so on.

As for length, well, some people will always want what a weblog posting to say to be three lines, but they're people who don't read weblogs all that much either.

Stupid title, good (old) point.

I think solving this issue could/should/will be done by whatever ends up really nailing item 18 of Paul Graham's "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html):

"18. The WebOS. It probably won't be a literal translation of a client OS shifted to servers. But as applications migrate to servers, it seems possible there will be something that plays a central role like an OS does. We've already funded several startups that could be candidates. But this is a big prize, and there will probably be multiple winners."

I'm imagining something (begin hand-waving) like a VM image hosting service that lets you take your VM from hosting site to hosting site; which knows about your friends' VM images; and which is to VM images as ZumoDrive is to FUSE fileystems.

impressive how quickly the article goes from "fuck the cloud" to "its ok to use the cloud but don't forget to have local backups"

Ah.

I read halfway before I understood what he meant by "cloud." It's now officially an overloaded term, in danger of becoming meaningless like "web 2.0."

By cloud, he means all those services where you put your personal data, thoughts, and ideas -- potential black holes in the sky from which your lifework may never return. Flickr, LiveJournal, Twitter, Delicious, etc. fit in this bucket, and I couldn't agree more with his assessment that blindly using these services is stoopid.

Lately, on the other hand, I've been using the term "cloud" to refer to services that allow developers to dynamically allocate computing resources. I suppose this is better referred to as "utility computing" -- y'know, the stuff that Amazon (AWS), Google (AppEngine), Microsoft (Azure), and Rackspace (Mosso) are big into these days. That kind of cloud? Awesome.

"Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of." I think most of the article could have been compressed into this.

It opens up a useful business model for companies to get into a person's "cloud" and back things up for them, either into another cloud or into some hard model (DVD).

But then again, nobody thinks about backups until they really need one.

In summary: don't use stuff you don't trust (in this case the cloud) and don't trust stuff you do trust so much you don't have a plan B (e.g. backup your data yourself).

That was painfully long to read and the title was ultimately unrelated to the text. This could have been written in 3 paragraphs: 1 - explain the cloud, 2 - beware, 3 - how to keep yourself safe.

I also think using the 'cloud' can actually make our data much safer. I mean my home PC is much more vulnerable than a monster data mainframe in googles basement. As long as your password is sufficiently complex, google Docs is more secure for a 'secret' document than my home PC is.

Business idea: backup all RSS feeds on the web. When services go offline, offer to sell people back their own content for $$$.

Guess it would be too expensive atm ;-)

I think the cloud is a great opportunity for startup with great storage needs; it makes the whole startup creation cheaper.

On the other hand I will not dump a hard fetch technology on a big company cloud or an important piece of my application on some cloud no matter how soft. Given that there’s no real proprietary/ restitution agreement between you and cloud owners it doesn’t seem Wright. The last point I want to make is the Mainframe to PC comparison which appear to be shifting the other way around; It was proven unfit for evolution and probably will be again.

One advice to startup, store only space hungry data on the cloud (huge non tech files, images, music etc ..) we’ll see what the future brings next.

Although I agree that you should backup the things you care about (mental note: add "download all my stuff in a zip file" feature to poetry web app tonight), I do often wonder whether my backup strategy, personal machine chance of survival, ability to not lose CDs, etc. provides more security for my stuff than... say... BigTable.

It's better to have them in both places than in just either, privacy concerns aside. But if I were my mom, I'd be way better off having them in at least some pieces of the cloud (the ones likely to survive, and to give you your stuff if they are about to not survive?) than on my machine.

I think he's missing the point. "The Cloud" is not some magical faraway land where we ship our data for safekeeping. The value in the cloud is convenience, the ability to have one calendar, one music library, one book of contacts that is available ubiquitously on any device, anywhere in the world.

There's no real reason to use the cloud for data backup anyway, since uploading large files over DSL is a pain, and hard drives are holding steady (not!) at $100/TB.

Sounds like an Aristophanes play.