4 ms·

I don't literally mean a Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is the Apple 2 of what I'm imagining. I'm talking about some next generation stuff, picture a Firestick wi

I don't literally mean a Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is the Apple 2 of what I'm imagining. I'm talking about some next generation stuff, picture a Firestick with a much more refined iteration of sandstorm, with distributed apps that have hardly even been conceived of right today in 2017. If my roommate can plug a Roku into the TV, and knows how to use Ableton Live and Squarespace, there's absolutely no reason he couldn't use something like that. And there's no reason that those non-technical people couldn't continue to pay you for helping them use stuff like that. And there's no reason that people can't continue to use stuff like Facebook. But I have a feeling that people are going to be over that way of doing things by the time the next two decades are over.

adamsea 9y ago
Extrapolating the needs of business owners from your roommates behavior sounds like a winner ;-)
- macawfish 9y ago
  My roommates are all self employed musicians/artists, dependent on cloud services. So yeah I'm thinking about their business needs!
ivanhoe 9y ago
But you still have all maintenance related problems? How do you upgrade a hard disk or memory, go to their home? What happens if their home net is down or slow, no one can visit the site? Back in the days I was running a few web servers from my office directly, and it's a lot of extra work that is just not worth it.
- macawfish 9y ago
  There's still plenty of room for paid hosting services. But this lowers the bar in a major way. If their home network is down, hopefully their office network isn't, or their business partners' networks aren't. Also, these kinds of applications are practically begging for mesh networks. So what it means for a home network to be "down" could change a lot in the coming years.
- myhf 9y ago
  Why would you need to upgrade a hard disk or memory?
  - empath75 9y ago
    Have you ever worked in a datacenter.
    - throwaway8u73 9y ago
      Clearly not.
    - OJFord 9y ago
      How many datacentres does the average "small local business" have? For the price of hardware we're talking about, it'd just get replaced.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Who cares? The Internet is breaking all the time anyway. Every day at least one of the bigger / more important sites I visit has a temporary problem with something. Three days a week HN keeps returning CloudFlare errors to me. Even Facebook has some issues that break it every other week. The world isn't ending because of this, and it isn't going to end because the site I co-host with my other friend is down for the night. As you grow to the point where close-to-perfect reliability matters, you'll be able to afford to get someone do handle the hosting for you, just like you do today.
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    Not denying you get these issues or errors with sites. But how come I never seem to have any issues with major sites. I do see cloudflare stuff. But never for a top 1000 site.
jchanimal 9y ago
Let’s imagine a real path to market: some big 5 company offers a “Facebook accelerator” usb compute stick that you put on your network and it provides local access and resiliency.
x2398dh1 9y ago
You are trying to communicate a wonderful message with an extreme amount of vision to people who sling code and do devops all day. What many of them may hear is you are asking them to do a bunch of work. But if you think 10-20 years in the future, your server was running something like a Phoenix type environment, then scaling wouldn't be as much of an issue. There are ways that updates and other problems can be abstracted away in a non-cloud environment. There are ways of running lean technologies on commodity hardware for servers. The bottleneck I see is bandwidth and government regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum. If Amit Pai gets his way then what you are talking about will be much more difficult.

adamsea 9y ago

Extrapolating the needs of business owners from your roommates behavior sounds like a winner ;-)

macawfish 9y ago
My roommates are all self employed musicians/artists, dependent on cloud services. So yeah I'm thinking about their business needs!

ivanhoe 9y ago

But you still have all maintenance related problems? How do you upgrade a hard disk or memory, go to their home? What happens if their home net is down or slow, no one can visit the site? Back in the days I was running a few web servers from my office directly, and it's a lot of extra work that is just not worth it.

macawfish 9y ago
There's still plenty of room for paid hosting services. But this lowers the bar in a major way. If their home network is down, hopefully their office network isn't, or their business partners' networks aren't. Also, these kinds of applications are practically begging for mesh networks. So what it means for a home network to be "down" could change a lot in the coming years.
myhf 9y ago
Why would you need to upgrade a hard disk or memory?
- empath75 9y ago
  Have you ever worked in a datacenter.
  - throwaway8u73 9y ago
    Clearly not.
  - OJFord 9y ago
    How many datacentres does the average "small local business" have? For the price of hardware we're talking about, it'd just get replaced.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Who cares? The Internet is breaking all the time anyway. Every day at least one of the bigger / more important sites I visit has a temporary problem with something. Three days a week HN keeps returning CloudFlare errors to me. Even Facebook has some issues that break it every other week. The world isn't ending because of this, and it isn't going to end because the site I co-host with my other friend is down for the night. As you grow to the point where close-to-perfect reliability matters, you'll be able to afford to get someone do handle the hosting for you, just like you do today.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Not denying you get these issues or errors with sites. But how come I never seem to have any issues with major sites. I do see cloudflare stuff. But never for a top 1000 site.

jchanimal 9y ago

Let’s imagine a real path to market: some big 5 company offers a “Facebook accelerator” usb compute stick that you put on your network and it provides local access and resiliency.

x2398dh1 9y ago

You are trying to communicate a wonderful message with an extreme amount of vision to people who sling code and do devops all day. What many of them may hear is you are asking them to do a bunch of work. But if you think 10-20 years in the future, your server was running something like a Phoenix type environment, then scaling wouldn't be as much of an issue. There are ways that updates and other problems can be abstracted away in a non-cloud environment. There are ways of running lean technologies on commodity hardware for servers. The bottleneck I see is bandwidth and government regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum. If Amit Pai gets his way then what you are talking about will be much more difficult.