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Comment by human20190310 | Hacker News Reader

human20190310

What is the purpose of having "the cloud" in your home at all? To me "the cloud's" primary value is that it is running off-site, in an environment that capably and regularly deals with broken equipment. If my work is backed up in Google/Dropbox's data center, I don't have to worry about it if my house gets flooded.

Having the cloud in your house, running on whatever stuff is laying around, just seems one small step removed from just keeping everything on your laptop and hoping it doesn't break.

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You're not wrong about the benefits of the Cloud. Some people make bomb shelters in their basement, some people stockpile canned goods. I stockpile data. I even have an old text only offline copy of the English Wikipedia.

My main issues are privacy. I don't want Google peeking into everything I upload for marketing materials. I also don't want to trust a third party company with my kids photos. They can change their privacy policy in the blink of an eye, or disable my account by accident without reason or warning.

Then there's the security aspect, and I'm settling in for a fight here. Google, AWS, Azure... These are all consolidated attack vectors. When WWIII breaks out it's not starting in the physical world. It's starting on the internet, and the first casualties are going to be major infrastructure providers followed immediately by FB, Google, Microsoft, and AWS.

Take out those 4 companies and our world is in chaos. Your company won't get their emails, their apps will be offline, and half our economy will be out of business by morning time.

But not me. My RAID arrays are still spinning away and if I want to I can reach out and touch them. Who knows where everyone elses data is. That's not my problem.

It's a pretty narrow window of global chaos where this approach is advantageous. You're optimizing for a situation where cloud infrastructure is demolished, but the power grid and/or fuel supply chain required to keep your specific RAID arrays spinning is operational.

One is dependent on the other, no?

If I don't have electricity I don't have ANY storage. Mine or Google's.

But I can still have mine without Google. It doesn't work the other way around. And Google's got a much larger target on their back than I do.

Great dialogue here, you should turn it into a video with some epic music in the background, and fading images in and out, rock flag and eagle.

And host the video on a rasberry pi, at your home, on Peertube

I have been enjoying learning about self hosting, Matrix.org has been the next project I am interested in, once I get bored with other current hobby projects. Hosting my own node, that and I am waiting for the Google photos clone to get up version 1.0 so I can self host all my images too.

> waiting for the Google photos clone to get up version 1.0

What is the closest open source alternative to Google photos?

Well, all good points, except no one really cares about your data on the cloud. You might see relevant ads though, i.e. your particular docs and photos are just slightly above pink noise.

And "take those 4 companies out" is - close to impossible. In case of WW III, you might have more things to worry about than your kids photos.

I'm fine with Apple having a copy of my notes, docs and pics. I do have a local backup. I'm not going through the trouble of trying to host it on my 5Mbit upload stream.

I like to have control over my data and I don't have a lot of trust to most cloud storage services (especially not google).

That said in the end it's personal preference, it's not for everyone. I'm also a hobby admin who enjoys it.

I mean, what you're looking for is... an external hard drive, which is what this essentially appears to be (but maybe with some nice versioning built in).

I don't know if it's possible to distinguish this product from a USB stick with git.

The thing you're missing is the ability to access it from anywhere, without having to carry around devices. The whole reason people use the Cloud is because they leave USB sticks and drives behind all the time. Home Cloud solves the trust issue of using a third party to handle private data and also the problem of leaving your storage devices all over the globe (where they can be stolen).

Ah, I found their FAQ - sorry I'd been trying to figure stuff out via the marketing material. So it looks like it's basically a multi-transport supporting SFTP-like server that is mostly based around intelligently syncing and ordering your file versions.

The application provides no discoverability solutions (so to use it remotely you've got to know how to acquire a static IP, maybe a name - and then configure firewalls as needed) and from what I can see there is no data replication other than the optimistic statement "The data will probably be on at least one local server and the central file store".

Home Cloud is just a ridiculous phrase. Cloud should mean raided hard drives inside clustered servers, with failover switches and routers, possibly even geo-redundancy. A single point of failure in almost every regard, even accessible remotely, is the antithesis of abstracting away failure points. Cloud should not be restricted to abstracting away hardware and only surfacing a provisioning layer, it needs to include invisible redundancies.

Really? Because anyone with a PC and an internet connection can assume their own hosting duties without all that.

And if they really wanted to make up the geographic shortcomings they can image and encrypt their files and still use Google drive like everyone else. There's your redundancy with privacy.

Cloud, to me, just means "someone else's computer."

Cloud is supposed to be where downtime isnt a thing, or isnt really possible (minus dns of course.)

Someone elses computer, without failovers, will never be "always up."

Someone elses computer is just "hosting." A cloud is a datacenter, not a server.

Your own computer available from anywhere on the internet is just "remote access."

Cloud has always meant either distributed computing or complexity abstracted away because its moot and only the resulting service matters.

Semantics aside, are you saying that someone with extra compute resources shouldn't put those resources to work to store their personal data to reduce reliance on for-profit third parties?

What is your argument here? That people shouldn't be encouraged to do something on their own? That people shouldn't bother reducing their reliance on "freemium" or paid PaaS companies, even if they have the skills/resources to do so?

You seem to want nothing more than for me to admit that "the online place where I store my personal files" is not the same as a "Cloud" and in reality it doesn't matter what it's called. It's purpose is the same, and it fulfills that purpose well.

It's a completely semantical argument. I said the phrase was ridiculous.

I didn't once say anything about the technology or whether it was better to store things yourself. All I said was those other things have their own names and calling them cloud is either misleading or lazy.

And yes, that's exactly what I want you to say, that your home server, despite being remotely accessible, isn't covered under the definition of cloud computing.

Hum, my memory of the early days of "cloud" as a term paints a different picture.

You had highly resilient, scalable, backed up, distributed servers before the "cloud": cloud provided all that with an API and instant UI, and made it affordable.

In that sense, "putting my data in the cloud" always makes me giggle, even though I accept how the term has come to be used. What people usually mean with that is that they are using an online file storage service that may or may not be implemented using a cloud infrastructure, but they don't really care.

I mean, why is OpenStack "a private cloud" (or Eucalyptus if you remember that one)? And why wouldn't you be able to do DNS on cloud infrastructure as well (in fact, many do)? FWIW, DNS itself is a prime example of a resilient (virtually no downtime), scalable, distributed service that predates "cloud" by decades.

What decade are you calling the early days? Early 90s, mid 2000s?

Late 80s

the "cloud provided all that with an API and instant UI, and made it affordable" came in the 80s?

Mid-2000s: the term "cloud" was highly popularized by Amazon, and went on to have this particular connotation for a while.

In the last decade, it has turned to simply mean "on the internet", which, to me, is unnecessary since you can just say "on the internet" instead. Eg. how is an internet file storage service different from cloud storage service?

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