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Comment by jackklika | Hacker News Reader

I think that local storage of personal data ("data most important to you") will be a huge trend in the next few years for both homes and offices, especially if they can back up data to other trusted devices (in other homes and offices of trusted people). As always the problem is going to be usability - the AWS ecosystem is not friendly to non-techies.

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I don't mean to sound snarky but isn't "local storage of personal data" what off the shelf NAS devices (QNAP, Synology, WD..) have been doing for almost two decades?

Even the backup thing, last time I tried they all had some pretty simple UI built around a rsync fork

I was thinking more having a "personal cloud" between trusted connected devices at different sites.

Being able to buy/rent an AWS outpost of this size for home use would actually be pretty neat.

> the AWS ecosystem is not friendly to non-techies.

nor is it supposed to be. AWS is tools to build end-consumer products, not an actual end-consumer product itself.

I actually think it's not so unfriendly. I have a stock trader friend who keeps all of his transaction records in S3 buckets, and he's not a 'techie'.

It's akin to having an understanding in file system - just that it's in the cloud this time. I'm sure a lot of non-techie understand enough about file systems to work what they needed it to do. And the same goes for the cloud.

I wish people would stop thinking of S3 as a filesystem because it isn't, and in ways that can cause serious issues. I can't tell you how many questions I get from devs asking "how do I rename a file in S3?" You can't. They're not files. It's not a filesystem. The folders you see on the web interface are just sugar, but if you have only a superficial knowledge of S3, you might be tricked into believing it behaves like a filesystem.

S3 is an eventually-consistent object store. We need to treat it as such.

You're exactly right, but non-techies doesn't distinguish nearly as much - file systems or S3 buckets is just a place to drop stuff and get them later/ or not. In this case, conincidentally, non-tech people have much less barrier to the concept, because they never really understood file system in the first place. They understood it enough to make their own stuff work, and honestly that's good enough for them.

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