Cloud first? Not private

What exactly is Cloud?

By cloud, I mean services where you don’t have fixed resources and systems, but the service is offered completely independently of any hardware. Dropbox was one of the first major cloud service providers, but also Google with its office solution or Amazon AWS with dynamically scaling resources. The actual system is managed by the provider, and you can use exactly the service you’ve booked: storage space, office, 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 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 am I using at all, and how do I secure it and the underlying system?

Advantages of the Cloud

It quickly becomes clear that cloud solutions are very convenient for the end-user. Download Dropbox or OneDrive, install, log in, and select folders. Files are then synchronized to and from the cloud. Open Google Docs, log in, and start writing. It’s automatically saved, and nothing needs to be installed.

But even for professional users, it’s tempting. Quickly set up a small homepage? Open AWS, book web resources, and the web server is ready in minutes. If the site becomes more popular than expected, you simply add more capacity, or it might even happen automatically up to a set limit.

At work, I also regularly see the benefits, and I have a current example. Our OCR solution, i.e., extracting text from scanned documents, works well, but not as well as we’d like. Thanks to the cloud, we now rent absolutely flexible GPU power from a provider and can check whether recognition can be improved with GPU and AI. If it gets better, but more power would be useful? Just book more power. If nothing improves? Then we just switch it off again.

Disadvantages of the Cloud

For providers

Cloud services can therefore be simple and flexible. In the end, there are still physical servers behind the cloud. The real difference is the software on them. This software must be written and maintained. The servers must be purchased and operated. However, the risk of utilization now lies with the provider. Since clouds are supposed to be flexible, a certain overcapacity must be available to react to customer requests at short notice. If there is no demand, the provider pays for the capacity without earning 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 certainly flexible internally in allocation. They use unused capacities for their own purposes until someone needs them and pays for them. If capacity becomes free, it is used for internal calculations. Small companies do not 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. However, they don’t want to bear this risk alone and price it accordingly. But the administration software and interfaces also need to be created and maintained. This is an additional effort that also needs to be paid for. If you know your resource requirements and software environment precisely, you don’t need this flexibility and will probably get away cheaper with a classic solution.

In recent years, this topic has also been viewed very much in black and white. Cloud-only or on-premise-only were the approaches. Meanwhile, many have realized that a hybrid operation is also possible. Cloud-first would be one such approach. New projects are first implemented in the cloud and evaluated there. If they work and their requirements can be clearly determined, they can be moved to their own hardware. Or they remain in the cloud if flexibility is desired. It depends on the use case.

For private customers

For private customers, the situation is somewhat different. Here, it’s less about pure performance and more about services. Providers make the cloud extremely appealing through ease of use. When starting a new PC, you’re immediately offered data backup to OneDrive. Back up your iPhone? Just use iCloud! Notes? Always synchronized with Notion, Evernote, and co., and thus always with you. Always with you and always with the provider. Many claim to encrypt the data, but it’s hard to verify. You trust that the provider keeps the data private and simultaneously ensures its security and availability.

Furthermore, you are dependent on the provider. Almost 10 years ago, Evernote was the leading note-taking program on the market. Fast, lean, and with good features, also thanks 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 many bugs. The problem was that moving thousands of notes wasn’t so easy.

Wunderlist was closed and became Microsoft ToDo, Amazon Photos discontinued its service, Google shut down its RSS Reader and many other services, Sonos released new software with fewer features, the cloud for the surveillance camera was switched off, rendering the device unusable, and so on. The list of discontinued or significantly altered services is long, and the options for users are limited. Usually, it’s just a matter of accepting it or switching.

Conclusion

Wouldn’t it be convenient if your own files were automatically synchronized to OneDrive? Pictures from your iPhone go directly to iCloud? And notes are available everywhere? Of course, it would.
But do you still have control over your data and services then? Can you rely on these services? Unfortunately, no.

I myself use very few cloud services. For communication, Discord, iMessage, and WhatsApp. For Obsidian, I currently use 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 stored on a local NAS with RAID1. Currently synchronized, so not as a backup. Some services run on my old notebook, important services on a rented server. It offers significantly 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 storage offers here. Classic storage, no “Cloud”. There I could back up my data incrementally and encrypted.

However, it is clear that clouds are simpler than self-managed solutions. Nevertheless, if possible, I do not rely on the cloud but on a solution that is under my control.