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So there are a number of issues that are not really answered here. 1) the cloud is a costed model. you pay a company to look after your stuff, so you dont have

So there are a number of issues that are not really answered here. 1) the cloud is a costed model. you pay a company to look after your stuff, so you dont have to manage it yourself 2) the cloud _is_ more expensive, but not compared to hiring your own infrastructure people (depends on scale of course) 3) distrubuted networks of things are much much slower than centralised. save for a few exceptions. 4) Trust. even though you stuff should be encrypted, spaffing it out in the open is a large risk, because should your old keys leak, it'll be trivial to retrieve old data. 5) money. who on earth is going to buy, run and maintain this infrastructure? whats in it for them? Who organises development of tools, patching etc? who do I call when there is an outage. in short for this to work, it would required a 180 degree culture shift of capitailsm. also physics, to make globally distrubuted systems both fast, relaiable and consistent

fredrb 9y ago
> 180 degree culture shift of capitalism You can monetize from distributed systems; and I think this will happen more often with Blockchain, render farms and things like that. > who on earth is going to buy, run and maintain this infrastructure? This. As much as I love the idea of decentralization, I can't see it getting much traction because of this.
- pdimitar 9y ago
  > > who on earth is going to buy, run and maintain this infrastructure? > This. As much as I love the idea of decentralization, I can't see it getting much traction because of this. At least 90% of all smartphone users are clueless as to when apps work in the background on their devices, so if you install an app that turns your smartphone into a lightweight node in a p2p network, almost everybody will be none the wiser IMO.
  - KaiserPro 9y ago
    and how many of your programs can run in a guaranteed nothing environment? Can your process your sensitive data on an unknown device without leaking any secrets? Sure, pushing bits from one place to the other is easy. But _processing_ that data in any meaningful way is impossibly hard
    - pdimitar 9y ago
      Do you expect a plan that covers 100% of all problematic points from the get go? As if the current technologies aren't patched to oblivion right now. We can at least avoid the problems we already know exist. That's a progress in itself, wouldn't you agree? Like with physical exercise, you start off somewhere and you discover solutions to problems you didn't know how to solve, along the way. Also, I am not sure what you mean. What part of distributing encrypted data and decrypting it with your key on arrival is hard? Admittedly, it would require a big shift in how we code apps. I am not opposed to that though.
      - KaiserPro 9y ago
        I have mildly secret data that I want to process, for example a credit card transaction, how do I securely decrypt, process, re-encrypt and upload to the destination? Processing that data requires a remote CPU that can't be spied upon. In a de-centralised environment how can I get a reasonable guarantee that the person hosting the CPU isn't just listening to the secrets?
        pdimitar 9y ago
        And how do you guarantee that in a centralized system? You don't. It's a wishful thinking based on unfounded trust. I can't answer your question directly. We simply can't rely on anyone hence we have encryption and key chains.
        KaiserPro 9y ago
        What threat model are you looking at? I'm talking about providing enough guarentees to sign a contract with another buisness, not hide from government actors. as a normal buisness I want to process sensitive information. That is not possible in the world you describe, with current CPUs
- KaiserPro 9y ago
  The only instance where this works its mining pools. I've seen offerings for renderfarms, but they never scale, are all heterogeneous in both hardware and stability, and never worth the hassle. Plus it involves shifting highly sensitive assets to unknown third-parties its impossible to sell to the movies/TV studios
stephenr 9y ago
> 1) the cloud is a costed model. you pay a company to look after your stuff, so you dont have to manage it yourself > 2) the cloud _is_ more expensive, but not compared to hiring your own infrastructure people If you think "the cloud" means you don't need sysadmins/ops, you're kidding yourself.
- KaiserPro 9y ago
  No, I am a sysadmin. but if you are a medium sized internet based buisness looking after < than 30 instances of things, the cloud is the way to go. and I don't mean just using ec2 instances. Thats just terribly expensive. The payoff is using managed services like RDS, vs running your own HA DB cluster.
  - dx034 9y ago
    If you have a HA DB cluster with predictable usage pattern (most fall into that category), it should be cheaper to run it yourself (with the employees needed for it) than using RDS for most sizes. That doesn't mean having your own data centre but renting some dedicated servers somewhere. The additional work after setting it up isn't that much more than for the cloud where you still have to monitor uptime and load.
    - zbentley 9y ago
      Strongly disagree. Hand-waving the initial setup period away hides a substantial footer cost (it is quite hard to learn how to safely, properly install a large database stack, especially if you're unfamiliar with it), and a substantial ongoing cost (updates etc.) that is often eliminated or ameliorated with cloud-hosted options. And the additional work after setting it up is much greater. You have to monitor uptime/load/etc. regardless, sure, but when running your own hardware you also need to monitor uptime and load of other things as well: internet connectivity to your servers, electrical power, human access to servers/physical security and so on. Especially for a small site, those are quite expensive; their cost decreases a bit when you're running or leasing a lot of hardware, but it's still quite high.

fredrb 9y ago

> 180 degree culture shift of capitalism You can monetize from distributed systems; and I think this will happen more often with Blockchain, render farms and things like that. > who on earth is going to buy, run and maintain this infrastructure? This. As much as I love the idea of decentralization, I can't see it getting much traction because of this.

pdimitar 9y ago
> > who on earth is going to buy, run and maintain this infrastructure? > This. As much as I love the idea of decentralization, I can't see it getting much traction because of this. At least 90% of all smartphone users are clueless as to when apps work in the background on their devices, so if you install an app that turns your smartphone into a lightweight node in a p2p network, almost everybody will be none the wiser IMO.
- KaiserPro 9y ago
  and how many of your programs can run in a guaranteed nothing environment? Can your process your sensitive data on an unknown device without leaking any secrets? Sure, pushing bits from one place to the other is easy. But _processing_ that data in any meaningful way is impossibly hard
  - pdimitar 9y ago
    Do you expect a plan that covers 100% of all problematic points from the get go? As if the current technologies aren't patched to oblivion right now. We can at least avoid the problems we already know exist. That's a progress in itself, wouldn't you agree? Like with physical exercise, you start off somewhere and you discover solutions to problems you didn't know how to solve, along the way. Also, I am not sure what you mean. What part of distributing encrypted data and decrypting it with your key on arrival is hard? Admittedly, it would require a big shift in how we code apps. I am not opposed to that though.
    - KaiserPro 9y ago
      I have mildly secret data that I want to process, for example a credit card transaction, how do I securely decrypt, process, re-encrypt and upload to the destination? Processing that data requires a remote CPU that can't be spied upon. In a de-centralised environment how can I get a reasonable guarantee that the person hosting the CPU isn't just listening to the secrets?
      - pdimitar 9y ago
        And how do you guarantee that in a centralized system? You don't. It's a wishful thinking based on unfounded trust. I can't answer your question directly. We simply can't rely on anyone hence we have encryption and key chains.
        KaiserPro 9y ago
        What threat model are you looking at? I'm talking about providing enough guarentees to sign a contract with another buisness, not hide from government actors. as a normal buisness I want to process sensitive information. That is not possible in the world you describe, with current CPUs
KaiserPro 9y ago
The only instance where this works its mining pools. I've seen offerings for renderfarms, but they never scale, are all heterogeneous in both hardware and stability, and never worth the hassle. Plus it involves shifting highly sensitive assets to unknown third-parties its impossible to sell to the movies/TV studios

stephenr 9y ago

> 1) the cloud is a costed model. you pay a company to look after your stuff, so you dont have to manage it yourself > 2) the cloud _is_ more expensive, but not compared to hiring your own infrastructure people If you think "the cloud" means you don't need sysadmins/ops, you're kidding yourself.

KaiserPro 9y ago
No, I am a sysadmin. but if you are a medium sized internet based buisness looking after < than 30 instances of things, the cloud is the way to go. and I don't mean just using ec2 instances. Thats just terribly expensive. The payoff is using managed services like RDS, vs running your own HA DB cluster.
- dx034 9y ago
  If you have a HA DB cluster with predictable usage pattern (most fall into that category), it should be cheaper to run it yourself (with the employees needed for it) than using RDS for most sizes. That doesn't mean having your own data centre but renting some dedicated servers somewhere. The additional work after setting it up isn't that much more than for the cloud where you still have to monitor uptime and load.
  - zbentley 9y ago
    Strongly disagree. Hand-waving the initial setup period away hides a substantial footer cost (it is quite hard to learn how to safely, properly install a large database stack, especially if you're unfamiliar with it), and a substantial ongoing cost (updates etc.) that is often eliminated or ameliorated with cloud-hosted options. And the additional work after setting it up is much greater. You have to monitor uptime/load/etc. regardless, sure, but when running your own hardware you also need to monitor uptime and load of other things as well: internet connectivity to your servers, electrical power, human access to servers/physical security and so on. Especially for a small site, those are quite expensive; their cost decreases a bit when you're running or leasing a lot of hardware, but it's still quite high.