Don't trust clouds. How Tech Ruins the Future

Don't trust clouds

"They are as reliable as a 50s fifth-hand Fiat" The phrase refers to cloud-connected devices and was not said by anyone at the Free Software Foundation. It is from a article published by the Electric Engineering Journal.

The cloud was the natural evolution of the computing industry.to. With processing power getting cheaper and connection speeds increasing, it made perfect sense to outsource storage and program execution. After all, we no longer go to the river to fetch water, nor do we have an electric generator in the back of the house.

Don't trust clouds

The compilation made by the Journal's chronicler is of terror:

  • The last month of last year (2020) Google left thousands and thousands of users for hourss from Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Hangouts, Analytics, Google Maps, Blogger and the rest of their services.
  • So as not to be less, Microsoft shut down Outlook users twice within three months. On one occasion it was due to a bad software update.
  • And the trio is completed by Amazon that for reasons that are unknown had a crash of your Web Services damaging among others Adobe, Roku, Flickr, Autodesk, iRobot and other large companies including various media.
  • Nest security cameras (Property of Google) need to connect to the cloud to work.  According to the chronicler, the cloud servers they use go down often, which makes them an expensive ornament..
  • And speaking of nests, another Google service discontinued by the company was Nest Secure. It was a home alarm system with door sensors and a hub that could be locked and unlocked with an NFC tag or Android app. The hardware was available from $ 500, and you could opt for annual subscriptions in the range of $ 60 to $ 120 The thing is that the Nest Secure hardware is not compatible with that of another provider.
  • Nucleus manufactures Android-based wall tablets that serve as a home intercom and bulletin board  Some time after having bought their devices, they stopped having functionalities and the company communicated to users that if they want to recover them they have to pay for an upgrade.
  • In the case of subscription games, he cites two extremes; Disintegration (a multiplayer battle game that lasted 5 months) and Farmville, but in this case the problem is that it was based on Flash and there is no longer support.

A model that fails

I want to stop at the only comment on the article that we are citing because it seems to me that it hits the heart of the problem.

… It appears that some of these companies have junior engineers running the nursing home. Just because some guy is a genius, it doesn't mean they employ professional best practices, like, oh I don't know, thoroughly testing the code before deploying it, for example.

According to Wikipedia

… The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a product with enough features to satisfy initial customers, and provide feedback for future development.1 2 Some experts suggest that in B2b an MVP also means salable : «It is not an MVP until you sell it. Viable means you can sell it. ”3

Learning from an MVP is often less expensive than developing a product with more features, which increase costs and risk if the product fails, for example due to incorrect assumptions

Ehe minimum viable product is the basis of a business structure that emerged at the beginning of the XNUMXst century, the startup or startup company. The goal of these companies is rapid growth.

But that model is being increasingly questioned Because not only, in most cases they are not capable of generating value for shareholders (despite obtaining millions of income), they are also rained by complaints about working conditions and, as we demonstrated above, they do not have much interest in quality or winning customer loyalty.

Therefore, Until the quality of service providers improves, it is best not to trust clouds.


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  1.   Camilo Bernal said

    I have NEVER liked the concept of cloud computing, it seems to me that it is a throwback, a return to the silly terminals of the 70's. Since I discovered P2P networks several decades ago, I have been a strong supporter of distributed / decentralized computing (in addition, it reduces the risk of being spied on). If I can keep my data safe on my own hardware, why give it to a third party?

    I also don't like the client / server model very much, and I think it would be better to decentralize personal computing (perhaps companies do need to have a certain level of centralization).