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I don't know what this fluff is doing on HN. They make it sound like the Cloud Mafia forces everyone to use their server farms, instead of offering a product th

I don't know what this fluff is doing on HN. They make it sound like the Cloud Mafia forces everyone to use their server farms, instead of offering a product that people willingly choose to use. The rest is some hazy hype of CRDTs, as if their usage magically eliminated editing conflicts. Kleppmann is legit and his book is great, he deserves better than this.

samwillis 3y ago
While the article is certinaly and little "fluffy" - more infotainment and information - the concepts behind local first are sound, they are a strong and compelling way to build apps. Quite right CRDTs are not magic, but they do get you something like 80-90% of the way there for most CRUD style apps. There is also a bunch of work going on into developing new CRDTs for different use cases. What's important is articles like this help us to explain to less technical people what local first is, the advantages it has. They help to sell the concept. But ultimately Wired is entertainment isn't it.
rc_mob 3y ago
They do force it. The force your non technical CEO and your non technical customers to value these stupid cloud servers far too highly. This forces many to embrace cloud tech purely for marketing reasons.
- idlewords 3y ago
  Companies embrace cloud tech because it turns large capital budgets into operating budgets, and prevents dental implant companies or soda distributors from having to figure out how to hire competent sysadmins.
  - shortrounddev2 3y ago
    This is the important thing. So many people in tech think of these solutions in terms of tech, the ease of use of the tech, and the cost of the tech. But the ultimate cost in everything is the cost of labor. On-premise solutions require on-premise administrators, with full time salaries (who are mostly sitting around waiting for work or problems to arise). It is far simpler and cheaper to contract the work out to a cloud provider and pay hourly for a tech's time. If you are a highly competent sysadmin you probably aren't working at a dental implant company. So the kinds of people non-tech companies hire are usually going to be lower quality and get paid less, increasing security risks
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    Competent sysadmins who don't let the production DNS expire for example [0]? =) Companies use the cloud because then they don't have to hire a dozen sysadmins to manage their servers, they can focus on building the actual product. If I can choose between having 12 developers who can manage AWS and having a rotation of 8 sysadmins wrangling in-house servers in three shifts and 4 developers, I'll always choose the one with more developers. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29873306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29873306
  - datadrivenangel 3y ago
    Replace all your competent sysadmins with even more expensive cloud architects!
    - thrixton 3y ago
      Cloud architectures can and should be relatively simple. It’s also a once off (kind of), and there are very established patterns to follow.
- dangus 3y ago
  Almost every company I’ve worked for in the last 10 years wouldn’t have even been founded in the first place without cloud computing. The value of cloud computing is that it gets business logic in production fast with unlimited flexibility and a reduced dependence on cost center specialists in areas like operations, security, and database administration. With cloud computing I can deploy my entire stack to a region in another part of the globe with ~10 lines of configuration, terraform apply and it’s done. I’m doing things by myself that I used to rely on multiple other people to handle (like setting up and maintaining databases, networking, firewalls, security tooling, etc). I also used to waste a bunch of time maintaining vendor products that had nothing to do with the business. I used to have responsibilities like Jira administrator - ick! The last time I worked for a company that had an on-premise data center I had a months-long email chain where I was told we were basically out of storage in a specific region so I had to wait for the VMs I requested.
bzzzt 3y ago
The cloud providers that also sold local software (Microsoft, Oracle) push people to the cloud by increasing the price of local software and discounting their cloud offerings (for a while at least).

samwillis 3y ago

While the article is certinaly and little "fluffy" - more infotainment and information - the concepts behind local first are sound, they are a strong and compelling way to build apps. Quite right CRDTs are not magic, but they do get you something like 80-90% of the way there for most CRUD style apps. There is also a bunch of work going on into developing new CRDTs for different use cases. What's important is articles like this help us to explain to less technical people what local first is, the advantages it has. They help to sell the concept. But ultimately Wired is entertainment isn't it.

rc_mob 3y ago

They do force it. The force your non technical CEO and your non technical customers to value these stupid cloud servers far too highly. This forces many to embrace cloud tech purely for marketing reasons.

idlewords 3y ago
Companies embrace cloud tech because it turns large capital budgets into operating budgets, and prevents dental implant companies or soda distributors from having to figure out how to hire competent sysadmins.
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  This is the important thing. So many people in tech think of these solutions in terms of tech, the ease of use of the tech, and the cost of the tech. But the ultimate cost in everything is the cost of labor. On-premise solutions require on-premise administrators, with full time salaries (who are mostly sitting around waiting for work or problems to arise). It is far simpler and cheaper to contract the work out to a cloud provider and pay hourly for a tech's time. If you are a highly competent sysadmin you probably aren't working at a dental implant company. So the kinds of people non-tech companies hire are usually going to be lower quality and get paid less, increasing security risks
- theshrike79 3y ago
  Competent sysadmins who don't let the production DNS expire for example [0]? =) Companies use the cloud because then they don't have to hire a dozen sysadmins to manage their servers, they can focus on building the actual product. If I can choose between having 12 developers who can manage AWS and having a rotation of 8 sysadmins wrangling in-house servers in three shifts and 4 developers, I'll always choose the one with more developers. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29873306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29873306
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  Replace all your competent sysadmins with even more expensive cloud architects!
  - thrixton 3y ago
    Cloud architectures can and should be relatively simple. It’s also a once off (kind of), and there are very established patterns to follow.
dangus 3y ago
Almost every company I’ve worked for in the last 10 years wouldn’t have even been founded in the first place without cloud computing. The value of cloud computing is that it gets business logic in production fast with unlimited flexibility and a reduced dependence on cost center specialists in areas like operations, security, and database administration. With cloud computing I can deploy my entire stack to a region in another part of the globe with ~10 lines of configuration, terraform apply and it’s done. I’m doing things by myself that I used to rely on multiple other people to handle (like setting up and maintaining databases, networking, firewalls, security tooling, etc). I also used to waste a bunch of time maintaining vendor products that had nothing to do with the business. I used to have responsibilities like Jira administrator - ick! The last time I worked for a company that had an on-premise data center I had a months-long email chain where I was told we were basically out of storage in a specific region so I had to wait for the VMs I requested.

bzzzt 3y ago

The cloud providers that also sold local software (Microsoft, Oracle) push people to the cloud by increasing the price of local software and discounting their cloud offerings (for a while at least).