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I think this article points to a missing product in the market - integrated cloud services but with the cloud located on a private server in the home. That wou

by blfr 4y ago

I think this article points to a missing product in the market - integrated cloud services but with the cloud located on a private server in the home. That would be very cool but, sadly, 60% of that market is in this comments thread. And we want it to be open source.

marcosdumay 4y ago
> And we want it to be open source. I don't see how that bit would be a problem. The market size, yes, it's a problem, but it's supposed to be a cloud service, there is no loss on the clients being open source.
- bsedlm 4y ago
  yes there's a loss, not a monetary/economic loss, but a loss of (potential) power. the fact the loss is "potential" irks me about calling it a 'loss'; it's not quite a loss, but a missed opportunity to leverage more power over.
merely-unlikely 4y ago
I suspect the market may actually be of decent size if you consider enterprises, journalists, politicians, and the like. Users who aren't necessarily tech savvy, won't stop using default services/apps without a fight, but who require a level or privacy that is currently somewhat compromised.
- vkou 4y ago
  Have you seen the unmitigated dumpster fire that is mass-market Wordpress hosting? Now imagine that, but even worse. Users who aren't tech savvy who are trying to run their own mission-critical software on their own hardware: 1. Should expect to pay $200+/month for a support plan. That will buy them one hour of an engineer's time per month. They are going to need that time, because deploying software is hard, keeping software running is hard, and there are no SRE/DevOps economies of scale when every Tom, Dick, and Harry wants to run their own service on their own hardware. 2. Should expect to either deal with all the problems (stability and security) that come with regular auto-updates, or regularly getting pwned (because they aren't auto-updating, and because they are a juicy, high ROI target for bad actors). 3. All this stuff already exists for enterprises, and they aren't complaining in these HN threads, because their needs are being met by cloud providers (As are the needs of politicians. Because they generally don't need security, they need security theatre. As long as they can check the compliance checkbox, they are in the clear.) The people whose needs aren't met are the long-tail small-fry of journalists and hobbyists and their ilk. Who aren't enough of a market, and can't afford the money, and the time, because see points #1 and #2. Like, maybe the NYT can afford to have this set up, and set up well for their people, but they already have dedicated IT teams doing just that!
smolder 4y ago
We want it to be open source because open source is the only source of services you can run at home or on premises at a small business for a reasonable cost. It's really a supply side issue pretending to be a demand one. Self hosted services of all kinds are woefully underdeveloped. Tech giants aren't going to encourage you to own your data and hardware by spending effort on supporting it, because that undermines key reasons for building cloud services: surveillance and control.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  Self-hosted services are woefully underdeveloped because people outside the open source community generally don't want them. I'm familiar with a couple of small organizations who've been around since the pre-cloud days; all of them hated "the server" and love that Google enabled them to get rid of it.
- ineptech 4y ago
  > Tech giants aren't going to encourage you to own your data and hardware by spending effort on supporting it On the contrary, it would make a lot of sense for Amazon to work on open source self-hosted server apps, because they would seem to be the answer to the question, "Why would a non-techy want a cloud VM." Surely their PMs must day-dream about a future in which a cloud VM is as common a monthly fee for a middle-class family as a gym membership or netflix subscription, right?
  - ineptech 4y ago
    Fake edit to add: there's a startup devoted to solving this problem with a novel OS intended to be a good platform for server-side apps, and since they appear unlikely to get traction I would be very happy to hear that Amazon is forking or duplicating it, just because I so badly want to be a user of such a product.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  I think you're missing a big reason which is support cost. one major advantage of cloud is that users can't screw up deployment.
rpdillon 4y ago
The product that kicked off the topic is Google Photos, which I recently neared my storage limit on. Sensing that Google One may not be an ideal next step, I set up my phone to backup photos and videos to my Synology instead using DSFile (Synology's file manager for Android). This has been pretty awesome so far, at least for my use cases. I think Synology is the closest product I know of that provides something like what you're describing, though, as you point out, it's not OSI open source.
- gernb 4y ago
  I use google photos for access, not backup. So, I can not only access all my photos from anywhere, I can also take advantage of their ML driven search. I'm not entirely happy with the UX of Google Photo's but it's 1000x better than a self hosted file share
  - rpdillon 4y ago
    Ah, misunderstanding, perhaps. Synology offers global access, search, browsing, a dedicated app, and face detection. I just set up backup through the file manager.
    - rnk 4y ago
      But what reason is there to believe that the synology software stack isn't doing the same scanning of your texts, photos, whatever you put there. What happens if synology decides you did something illegal or 'bad' whatever that could mean, could they block your access on your own device, even if you were exonerated? And while that seems to be a great system, they can have bugs, make a mistake, have bad policies. I don't see a solution for this. Billions of people and probably a ton of people reading this on hacker news like me have their stuff at google or another top cloud provider. Google causes untold suffering for people by not let people recover their accounts. There was the recent librarian letter requesting help for people this happens too. We might know someone at google to ask for help. Wonder if this person did.
      - 4y ago

by blfr 4y ago

marcosdumay 4y ago

> And we want it to be open source. I don't see how that bit would be a problem. The market size, yes, it's a problem, but it's supposed to be a cloud service, there is no loss on the clients being open source.

bsedlm 4y ago
yes there's a loss, not a monetary/economic loss, but a loss of (potential) power. the fact the loss is "potential" irks me about calling it a 'loss'; it's not quite a loss, but a missed opportunity to leverage more power over.

merely-unlikely 4y ago

I suspect the market may actually be of decent size if you consider enterprises, journalists, politicians, and the like. Users who aren't necessarily tech savvy, won't stop using default services/apps without a fight, but who require a level or privacy that is currently somewhat compromised.

vkou 4y ago
Have you seen the unmitigated dumpster fire that is mass-market Wordpress hosting? Now imagine that, but even worse. Users who aren't tech savvy who are trying to run their own mission-critical software on their own hardware: 1. Should expect to pay $200+/month for a support plan. That will buy them one hour of an engineer's time per month. They are going to need that time, because deploying software is hard, keeping software running is hard, and there are no SRE/DevOps economies of scale when every Tom, Dick, and Harry wants to run their own service on their own hardware. 2. Should expect to either deal with all the problems (stability and security) that come with regular auto-updates, or regularly getting pwned (because they aren't auto-updating, and because they are a juicy, high ROI target for bad actors). 3. All this stuff already exists for enterprises, and they aren't complaining in these HN threads, because their needs are being met by cloud providers (As are the needs of politicians. Because they generally don't need security, they need security theatre. As long as they can check the compliance checkbox, they are in the clear.) The people whose needs aren't met are the long-tail small-fry of journalists and hobbyists and their ilk. Who aren't enough of a market, and can't afford the money, and the time, because see points #1 and #2. Like, maybe the NYT can afford to have this set up, and set up well for their people, but they already have dedicated IT teams doing just that!

smolder 4y ago

We want it to be open source because open source is the only source of services you can run at home or on premises at a small business for a reasonable cost. It's really a supply side issue pretending to be a demand one. Self hosted services of all kinds are woefully underdeveloped. Tech giants aren't going to encourage you to own your data and hardware by spending effort on supporting it, because that undermines key reasons for building cloud services: surveillance and control.

SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
Self-hosted services are woefully underdeveloped because people outside the open source community generally don't want them. I'm familiar with a couple of small organizations who've been around since the pre-cloud days; all of them hated "the server" and love that Google enabled them to get rid of it.
ineptech 4y ago
> Tech giants aren't going to encourage you to own your data and hardware by spending effort on supporting it On the contrary, it would make a lot of sense for Amazon to work on open source self-hosted server apps, because they would seem to be the answer to the question, "Why would a non-techy want a cloud VM." Surely their PMs must day-dream about a future in which a cloud VM is as common a monthly fee for a middle-class family as a gym membership or netflix subscription, right?
- ineptech 4y ago
  Fake edit to add: there's a startup devoted to solving this problem with a novel OS intended to be a good platform for server-side apps, and since they appear unlikely to get traction I would be very happy to hear that Amazon is forking or duplicating it, just because I so badly want to be a user of such a product.
adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
I think you're missing a big reason which is support cost. one major advantage of cloud is that users can't screw up deployment.

rpdillon 4y ago

The product that kicked off the topic is Google Photos, which I recently neared my storage limit on. Sensing that Google One may not be an ideal next step, I set up my phone to backup photos and videos to my Synology instead using DSFile (Synology's file manager for Android). This has been pretty awesome so far, at least for my use cases. I think Synology is the closest product I know of that provides something like what you're describing, though, as you point out, it's not OSI open source.

gernb 4y ago
I use google photos for access, not backup. So, I can not only access all my photos from anywhere, I can also take advantage of their ML driven search. I'm not entirely happy with the UX of Google Photo's but it's 1000x better than a self hosted file share
- rpdillon 4y ago
  Ah, misunderstanding, perhaps. Synology offers global access, search, browsing, a dedicated app, and face detection. I just set up backup through the file manager.
  - rnk 4y ago
    But what reason is there to believe that the synology software stack isn't doing the same scanning of your texts, photos, whatever you put there. What happens if synology decides you did something illegal or 'bad' whatever that could mean, could they block your access on your own device, even if you were exonerated? And while that seems to be a great system, they can have bugs, make a mistake, have bad policies. I don't see a solution for this. Billions of people and probably a ton of people reading this on hacker news like me have their stuff at google or another top cloud provider. Google causes untold suffering for people by not let people recover their accounts. There was the recent librarian letter requesting help for people this happens too. We might know someone at google to ask for help. Wonder if this person did.
    - 4y ago