What is the cloud, anyway?
I define the cloud as services where you don’t have fixed resources and systems, but rather the service is offered completely independently of any hardware. Dropbox was one of the first major cloud service providers, but so were Google with its office suite and Amazon AWS with dynamically scaling resources. The actual system is managed by the provider, and you can use exactly the service you’ve subscribed to, whether it’s storage space, office software, or computing power.
In contrast, there are self-hosted solutions. You can’t quickly add resources, and the management of the entire system lies with the user. The technical expertise required here must be significantly greater, but the costs must also be considered. What performance do I need? Do I need it continuously, and if not, can I smooth out peaks and use weaker hardware instead? What software do I even use, and how do I secure it and the underlying system?
Advantages of the Cloud
You can see pretty quickly that for the end user, cloud solutions are very convenient. Download Dropbox or OneDrive, install it, log in, and select your folders. Just like that, your files are synchronized to the cloud and back again. Open Google Docs, log in, and start writing. It saves automatically, and nothing needs to be installed.
But even for professional users, it’s tempting. Need to quickly set up a small homepage? Open AWS, book web resources, and the web server is ready to go in minutes. If the site becomes more popular than expected, you just add more power—if that doesn’t happen automatically up to a set limit.
At work, I also see the advantages regularly, and I have a current example. Our OCR solution, which reads text from scanned documents, works well, but not as well as we’d like. Thanks to the cloud, we now rent GPU power from a provider with absolute flexibility and can test whether GPU and AI can improve recognition. If it gets better, but more power would be useful? Just book more power. If there’s no improvement? Then we just turn it off again.
Disadvantages of the Cloud
For Providers
So, cloud services can be simple and flexible. But at the end of the day, there are still physical servers behind the cloud. The real difference is the software on them. This software has to be written and maintained. The servers have to be purchased and operated. However, the risk of utilization now lies with the provider. Since clouds are supposed to be flexible, a certain amount of overcapacity must be available to react to customer requests at short notice. If there’s no demand, the provider pays for the capacity without generating revenue from it.
This is one of the reasons why mainly large and broadly positioned companies offer cloud services. Amazon itself needs a lot of power but is surely flexible in its internal allocation. They use unused capacity for their own purposes until someone needs it and pays for it. When capacity becomes free, it’s used for internal calculations. Small companies don’t have enough flexible tasks for such an approach.
For Business Customers
In the previous paragraph, you can see that providers take on a certain risk. But they don’t want to bear this risk alone and price it in accordingly. The management software and interfaces also have to be created and maintained. This is an additional expense that also has to be paid for. If you know your resource needs and software environment precisely, you don’t need this flexibility and will probably be better off with a classic solution.
In recent years, this topic has also been seen in very black-and-white terms. Cloud-only or on-premise-only were the options. Meanwhile, many have realized that a hybrid operation is also possible. “Cloud-first” would be something like that. New projects are first implemented and evaluated in the cloud. If they work and their demand can be clearly determined, they can be moved to their own hardware. Or they remain in the cloud if you want to stay flexible. You decide on a case-by-case basis.
For Private Customers
For private customers, the situation looks a bit different. Here, it’s less about pure performance and more about services. Providers make the cloud extremely appealing through its ease of use. When you start up a new PC, you’re immediately offered to back up your data to OneDrive. Backup your iPhone? Just use iCloud! Notes? Always synced with Notion, Evernote, and the like, and therefore always with you. Always with you and always with the provider. Many claim to encrypt the data, but you can hardly verify that. You trust that the provider will keep the data private while ensuring its security and availability.
Additionally, you are dependent on the provider. About 10 years ago, Evernote was the note-taking app on the market. Fast, lean, and with great features, thanks in part to native applications for every environment. However, maintaining these and keeping them at the same functional level was extremely difficult and costly for Evernote. So the company decided to build a universal web app instead, alienating many customers. The application was suddenly slow on all platforms, had fewer features, and plenty of bugs. The only problem was that migrating thousands of notes wasn’t so easy.
Wunderlist was shut down and became Microsoft To-Do, Amazon Photos discontinued its service, Google killed its RSS reader and many other services, Sonos is releasing new software with fewer features, the cloud for a security camera is being shut down, making the device unusable, and so on and so forth. The list of discontinued or significantly changed services is long, and the options for users are limited. Usually, it’s just accept it or switch.
Conclusion
Would it be convenient if my personal files were automatically synced to OneDrive? Pictures from my iPhone go directly to iCloud? And my notes are available everywhere? Of course, it is. But do you still have control over your data and services? Can you rely on these services? Unfortunately, no.
I myself use very few cloud services. For communication, I use Discord, iMessage, and WhatsApp. For Obsidian, I’m currently using the official sync service. However, the data is still stored locally and is fully encrypted. The plugins were all a bit unstable. That’s about it.
My data is on a local NAS with a RAID1 setup. Currently synchronized, so not as a backup. Some services run on my old laptop, while important services run on a rented server. It offers much more power than I need, but it runs 24/7 and has redundant connectivity. I still need a solution for backups. Hetzner seems to have good offers for storage here. Classic storage, not a “cloud.” There, I could back up my data incrementally and encrypted.
But you can see, clouds are simpler than self-managed solutions. Nevertheless, whenever possible, I don’t rely on the cloud but on a solution that is under my control.