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> It's freedom. AWS or any cloud service is anything but freedom. So please use the word freedom judiciously. If you are working with AWS your application and

> It's freedom. AWS or any cloud service is anything but freedom. So please use the word freedom judiciously. If you are working with AWS your application and your whole organization is at the whims of Amazon. You will not even be able to migrate if you are tied into those API's and services because they are not same across cloud providers. You don't even own the data or compute resource hosted on such cloud services because just by a single notice from a government agency your account will be blocked without access to your own data or compute resources. It has happened and will continue to happen because for government approaching single cloud provider is much easier than going over the process of getting it for company or an individual (more costly and difficult given different jurisdiction across country and state lines). In terms of technical freedom you will have less of it and will be tied into proprietary extensions, API and services offered by those cloud providers. On the other hand for self-hosted infrastructure government notice will not block access to resources owned by you and data in those resources. You can respond to notice and continue using those resources until court rules. So it is more freedom than a cloud can offer. In our organization we need to go extra mile and put extra engineering efforts to make sure our apps can work on different clouds with different services (e.g. using apache libcloud, avoiding proprietary API's).

busterarm 6y ago
> If you are working with AWS your application and your whole organization is at the whims of Amazon. Part of freedom is the freedom to do stupid things. > You will not even be able to migrate if you are tied into those API's and services because they are not same across cloud providers. VPCs, Instances, Load Balancers and Storage are roughly-equivalent everywhere and the differences between are mostly-trivial. For the rest of the "shinies" they offer, well, see above. > You don't even own the data or compute resource hosted on such cloud services because just by a single notice from a government agency your account will be blocked without access to your own data or compute resources. If you think this doesn't also apply to your physical racks in datacenters, you've got another thing coming. Ask Lavabit. Design for this in your strategy. You can still "own" your data and have it hosted in the cloud too. There's no reason to have to be exclusive. > In terms of technical freedom you will have less of it and will be tied into proprietary extensions, API and services offered by those cloud providers. As mentioned before, stick to running in instances and you're no differently off than anywhere else you can operate. > On the other hand for self-hosted infrastructure government notice will not block access to resources owned by you and data in those resources. You can respond to notice and continue using those resources until court rules. Absolutely not. With a warrant, the authorities will come and take your shit. They have guns. You don't. Ask Lavabit. Ask The Pirate Bay. Ask any blockchain drug pusher.
- dragonsh 6y ago
  > VPCs, Instances, Load Balancers and Storage are roughly-equivalent Worked enough as preferred partner with all 3 major cloud providers to know that roughly equivalent does not mean equal and efforts are significant. e.g. self-hosted haproxy or nginx is much better than those load balancers as each provider has their own set of API's. So please do not underestimate the efforts. > If you think this doesn't also apply to your physical racks in datacenters Self-hosted means more than just datacenters, can be within office or home. So it's not easy to shut. Also there are numerous examples of aws account suspended with all services blocked just based on one sided terms of service not even a legal notice requirement. As I said earlier most people trade freedom for convenience and that's what cloud service is. Its not freedom but slavery to convenience. > stick to running instances What's running is not the question here, but freedom and ownership. Here its still an issue of who owns the resources and data within those resources. Buried within terms of service and agreement its the cloud provider who is a judge, jury and executioner. > With a warrant, the authorities will come and take your shit. It's very hard to get a warrant from a court for a legitimate business to confiscate their resources (bar is just too high) vs a notice via an email to a cloud provider for perceived infringment (indeed most cloud provider have dedicated contacts for government notices and implementation, given they also provide services to government agencies). Also targeting individual self-hosted infrastructure is very costly. Examples you are presenting are just to create FUD, majority of the self-hosted infrastructure in the world is for legitimate purpose and true freedom.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    You can own your data and still use public cloud. You are familiar with using multi-site DR strategies, yes?
    - dragonsh 6y ago
      > You can own your data and still use public cloud. First it will be good if you read through the terms of service, privacy, data retention and service agreement contract. You will be astonished to know that buried deep within the legal language the data is owned by the cloud provider (as they own access as well as the rights to physical resource holding the data) and they provide you an option to export it (but this can be completely blocked by a notice from govt.). You can mitigate the risk by encrypting the data with your own key which is not shared with cloud provider (but indeed this is also not true most of the time given the key to encrypt the data is hosted with the cloud provider as well). For your reference AWS for its instances still do not support ed25519 key for SSH access and needs an RSA public key (although its less secure). We need to go extra mile to customize the AMI images to support ed25519 keys and remove the account and keys created by AWS. Please let me know how you will recover the data in case your multi-site deployment on AWS with DR is blocked by aws as they received a notice from government agency with a gag order. > You are familiar with using multi-site DR strategies, yes? Most companies using AWS or GCP or Azure use multi-region deployment (which means using different regions). But all will be shut down with a one single notice from government agency with gag order (you won't even know why given gag order). So your multi-site DR will only work if the company keeps a self-hosted backup of data to avoid cloud provider from shutting down access to the data. This is precisely my point that self-hosted guarantees freedom not the cloud which is right opposite of freedom (traded for convenience).

busterarm 6y ago

> If you are working with AWS your application and your whole organization is at the whims of Amazon. Part of freedom is the freedom to do stupid things. > You will not even be able to migrate if you are tied into those API's and services because they are not same across cloud providers. VPCs, Instances, Load Balancers and Storage are roughly-equivalent everywhere and the differences between are mostly-trivial. For the rest of the "shinies" they offer, well, see above. > You don't even own the data or compute resource hosted on such cloud services because just by a single notice from a government agency your account will be blocked without access to your own data or compute resources. If you think this doesn't also apply to your physical racks in datacenters, you've got another thing coming. Ask Lavabit. Design for this in your strategy. You can still "own" your data and have it hosted in the cloud too. There's no reason to have to be exclusive. > In terms of technical freedom you will have less of it and will be tied into proprietary extensions, API and services offered by those cloud providers. As mentioned before, stick to running in instances and you're no differently off than anywhere else you can operate. > On the other hand for self-hosted infrastructure government notice will not block access to resources owned by you and data in those resources. You can respond to notice and continue using those resources until court rules. Absolutely not. With a warrant, the authorities will come and take your shit. They have guns. You don't. Ask Lavabit. Ask The Pirate Bay. Ask any blockchain drug pusher.

dragonsh 6y ago
> VPCs, Instances, Load Balancers and Storage are roughly-equivalent Worked enough as preferred partner with all 3 major cloud providers to know that roughly equivalent does not mean equal and efforts are significant. e.g. self-hosted haproxy or nginx is much better than those load balancers as each provider has their own set of API's. So please do not underestimate the efforts. > If you think this doesn't also apply to your physical racks in datacenters Self-hosted means more than just datacenters, can be within office or home. So it's not easy to shut. Also there are numerous examples of aws account suspended with all services blocked just based on one sided terms of service not even a legal notice requirement. As I said earlier most people trade freedom for convenience and that's what cloud service is. Its not freedom but slavery to convenience. > stick to running instances What's running is not the question here, but freedom and ownership. Here its still an issue of who owns the resources and data within those resources. Buried within terms of service and agreement its the cloud provider who is a judge, jury and executioner. > With a warrant, the authorities will come and take your shit. It's very hard to get a warrant from a court for a legitimate business to confiscate their resources (bar is just too high) vs a notice via an email to a cloud provider for perceived infringment (indeed most cloud provider have dedicated contacts for government notices and implementation, given they also provide services to government agencies). Also targeting individual self-hosted infrastructure is very costly. Examples you are presenting are just to create FUD, majority of the self-hosted infrastructure in the world is for legitimate purpose and true freedom.
- busterarm 6y ago
  You can own your data and still use public cloud. You are familiar with using multi-site DR strategies, yes?
  - dragonsh 6y ago
    > You can own your data and still use public cloud. First it will be good if you read through the terms of service, privacy, data retention and service agreement contract. You will be astonished to know that buried deep within the legal language the data is owned by the cloud provider (as they own access as well as the rights to physical resource holding the data) and they provide you an option to export it (but this can be completely blocked by a notice from govt.). You can mitigate the risk by encrypting the data with your own key which is not shared with cloud provider (but indeed this is also not true most of the time given the key to encrypt the data is hosted with the cloud provider as well). For your reference AWS for its instances still do not support ed25519 key for SSH access and needs an RSA public key (although its less secure). We need to go extra mile to customize the AMI images to support ed25519 keys and remove the account and keys created by AWS. Please let me know how you will recover the data in case your multi-site deployment on AWS with DR is blocked by aws as they received a notice from government agency with a gag order. > You are familiar with using multi-site DR strategies, yes? Most companies using AWS or GCP or Azure use multi-region deployment (which means using different regions). But all will be shut down with a one single notice from government agency with gag order (you won't even know why given gag order). So your multi-site DR will only work if the company keeps a self-hosted backup of data to avoid cloud provider from shutting down access to the data. This is precisely my point that self-hosted guarantees freedom not the cloud which is right opposite of freedom (traded for convenience).