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Arguably, the guardian is a tech business at this point. However fundamentally - hosting is not its core competency. If you've ever tried to pinpoint a busine

by lumost 5y ago

Arguably, the guardian is a tech business at this point. However fundamentally - hosting is not its core competency. If you've ever tried to pinpoint a businesses's core competency the simple test is "is this something that if we fail at, we'll keep trying". There is a big execution risk in building a private cloud, you end up paying this risk both on whether you have the right people to build, maintain, and grow a datacenter - as well as whether you have the right set of APIs to support growing your application. Most businesses will look at the relative costs and opt for a private cloud solution, then price in the risk and go for the cloud solution. There is no reason the Guardian must control its own hardware.

dijit 5y ago
> There is no reason the Guardian must control its own hardware. No, but it has potential political ramifications, right? All the Cloud providers are US. Does this mean the guardian will be more wary about saying anything negative about the US? All the cloud providers are big companies, does this mean that the Guardian might be less critical of big companies? Obviously being completely vendor agnostic is difficult; but we shouldn't pretend that there could not be backlash in unexpected ways- even if "hosting is not a core competency". A thing that comes to my mind is Edward Snowden's revaluations: given the things he talked about (NSA was even tapping Google lines, for example): how could any whistleblower expect to not be exposed by accident if everyone is using a cloud provider in the US? It just strikes me as marginally naive to assume that nothing can/could go wrong here, you hand off an immeasurably large amount of control to an ambivalent entity and whatever regime they happen to be under.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  You bring up a good point. Last year when Parlor was kicked off of AWS, it was a dude awakening. Before that, I had (correctly) thought that AWS doesn't read the data you store and (incorrectly) AWS doesn't care what you store. I now realize the cloud providers are willing and able to express political opinions and delist people/companies that disagree with political parties.

by lumost 5y ago

dijit 5y ago

> There is no reason the Guardian must control its own hardware. No, but it has potential political ramifications, right? All the Cloud providers are US. Does this mean the guardian will be more wary about saying anything negative about the US? All the cloud providers are big companies, does this mean that the Guardian might be less critical of big companies? Obviously being completely vendor agnostic is difficult; but we shouldn't pretend that there could not be backlash in unexpected ways- even if "hosting is not a core competency". A thing that comes to my mind is Edward Snowden's revaluations: given the things he talked about (NSA was even tapping Google lines, for example): how could any whistleblower expect to not be exposed by accident if everyone is using a cloud provider in the US? It just strikes me as marginally naive to assume that nothing can/could go wrong here, you hand off an immeasurably large amount of control to an ambivalent entity and whatever regime they happen to be under.

geoduck14 5y ago
You bring up a good point. Last year when Parlor was kicked off of AWS, it was a dude awakening. Before that, I had (correctly) thought that AWS doesn't read the data you store and (incorrectly) AWS doesn't care what you store. I now realize the cloud providers are willing and able to express political opinions and delist people/companies that disagree with political parties.