[HN Gopher] On the web today, we don't use servers, we use services
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On the web today, we don't use servers, we use services
Author : sodimel
Score : 45 points
Date : 2021-09-09 12:36 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (misc.l3m.in)
(TXT) w3m dump (misc.l3m.in)
| EGreg wrote:
| That's why we need open-source software like GitLab that you can
| self-host.
|
| For blogs there's Wordpress. For stores there's Magento. For
| files there's OwnCloud. Sadly, for communities and collaboration
| (Web 2.0) there isn't that much. Matrix, Mastodon? They are
| nowhere near the functionality of Facebook, Telegram, LinkedIn et
| al.
|
| I spent 10 years reinvesting all our profits into building an
| open-source competitor to those centralized services, and it
| still needs some work to rival them:
| https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
|
| But I'll tell you something. Having your OWN servers and data is
| very attractive. That's why everyone moved away from America
| Online "keyword NYTimes" and towards hosting a web site on
| nytimes.com using the open HTTP protocol. Today, Facebook's
| "NYTimes" page is analogous to AOL Keyword NYTimes, Mark Z is
| analogous to Steve Case, and notifications are analogous to
| "You've Got Mail!" Nothing new under the sun... now we just need
| something like the Web to come along and disrupt them by letting
| everyone self-host their own stuff on a service that's almost as
| good. The Web Browser in the beginning only had Bold, Italic,
| etc. but publishers switched in droves, and users followed.
| dpflug wrote:
| https://zotsite.net/ or https://friendi.ca/ approximate
| Facebook, Telegram, LinkedIn on features (ignoring network
| effects).
| burundi_coffee wrote:
| I agree and I would like to recommend Nextcloud instead of
| Owncloud for anyone who needs more features than a NAS.
| Nextcloud has excellent support for calendar and contact
| synchronisation. There are a ton of other apps you can instal
| too: apps.nextcloud.com
| boplicity wrote:
| > Having your OWN servers and data is very attractive.
|
| This is true for businesses that can justify the cost of self
| hosting for a variety of business reasons.
|
| This isn't true for most end-users, who just want reliable
| services. Hence, Wordpress.com vs. self-hosted Wordpress.
|
| I don't want to be personally responsible for my data; I want a
| professional organization to make sure it is safe.
| [deleted]
| EGreg wrote:
| That is why we have IPFS and soon, SAFE Network!
|
| Look them up.
| sodimel wrote:
| I think small businesses don't want to spend X days per year
| to manage a self hosted solution, it's cheaper to just use a
| gafam service.
|
| (and I think that's a problem, OSS softwares today are
| ~reliable enough for end users, but not really for companies)
| boplicity wrote:
| I think I'm getting downvotes because people don't want this
| to be true. However, I'd like to hear an argument that makes
| my statements above not true.
|
| For example, my parents are never going to self host their
| own photos unless they're confident that it is safe and
| reliable, and takes almost no effort on their part. They
| don't want that responsibility, and frankly, there's no need.
|
| OSS can be built around businesses that take responsibility
| and host for others. Part of why so many of these platforms
| fail to gain mainstream support, is that they're _not_ built
| to support a solid business case, and instead somehow expect
| everyday people to learn far more than is realistic, just to
| replace a service that is free and easy.
|
| That doesn't have to be true. Wordpress, as mentioned above,
| is a very good example, as it provides both options. (Self
| hosting, vs. paying someone else to take that
| responsibility.)
| sodimel wrote:
| We have an initiative in France where local non-profit orgs
| setup and maintain such OSS services (for free or for a
| small fee). It's called "chatons"[0] (kittens), and it's
| great :)
|
| [0]: https://www.chatons.org/
| geofft wrote:
| That's not self-hosting. That's getting services from a
| third-party organization that happens to be a non-profit.
| The only difference between that and GitHub is that
| GitHub is a for-profit company, which setup and maintain
| services for you (for free or a small fee).
|
| So if the actual complaint is "stop supporting for-profit
| companies," sure (but then we have to ask why - there are
| reasons to expect that a for-profit company is likely to
| be more stable long-term, more likely to be secure,
| etc.). If the complaint is "GitHub / Microsoft in
| particular is bad, and chatons in particular is good,"
| sure (but then, what about for-profit competitors like
| GitLab?).
|
| But that's unrelated to the original complaint. As you
| say, chatons is maintaining OSS _services_ for you to
| interact with.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| If you aren't personally responsible for your data, does it
| really exist? Is it really yours? What if your professional
| organization says "we've installed some big data analytics",
| or "whoops we lost all your data"?
| boplicity wrote:
| > If you aren't personally responsible for your data, does
| it really exist?
|
| Yes.
|
| > Is it really yours?
|
| Yes, though obviously it depends on the service, and my
| agreement with them. Most of my photos, for example, are
| backed up in OneDrive, which works quite well for my
| purposes.
|
| > What if your professional organization says "we've
| installed some big data analytics", or "whoops we lost all
| your data"?
|
| Good question! My photos, for example, exist on my local
| computer, Microsoft OneDrive, and on Google Photos. The
| odds of losing them are, frankly, as non-existent as
| possible. Multiple storage locations, IMO, are a good way
| to mitigate the relatively low risk of losing cloud data.
| Also, almost no effort on my part is required.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| When I give a dress shirt to a professional dry cleaner,
| I'm not personally responsible for it while they're
| cleaning it. Its still my shirt. I'd consider using a
| different dry cleaner if they started keeping notes on what
| they thought I did to make my shirt dirty. If they lost the
| shirt, I'm angry and may even get some compensation, but
| the shirt is still gone and someone else probably has it.
|
| I completely understand that the scale and scope of abuse
| in tech can be much higher than with other services due to
| automation, but I don't see how its reasonable to question
| whether my stuff is still my stuff because I've entrusted
| it to a third party.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| The laws around data are completely different, at least
| in the USA. In general, if someone else has "your" data,
| it's actually their data.
| boplicity wrote:
| Source?
| tomc1985 wrote:
| After seeing how big of a hard-on business drones have for OpEx
| vs CapEx expenditures, I don't think the cloud is ever going
| away completely.
|
| Like we have an entire cloud "revolution" (note the mocking
| quotes) because of a bullshit _accounting_ rule!
| wahern wrote:
| The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts (aka Trump Tax Cut) actually
| permits (or just increased limits for?) taking a full
| deduction, up to $1 million, for computing hardware, rather
| than following a depreciation schedule. See https://en.wikipe
| dia.org/wiki/Section_179_depreciation_deduc... and
| https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/new-rules-and-limitations-
| for-d...
|
| We'll see if that catches on and makes a difference.
| Accountants, like software engineers and every other
| profession, tend to follow trends.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I think the interesting question is: what really qualifies as a
| service?
|
| IMHO, a service is just a program someone else manages running on
| a server, that I can use remotely with a REST API.
|
| In college, in the 80's, I used the symbolic math program Maple
| on an MTS mainframe. Is Maple a service? I say no, only because
| services tend to be web related, they have a REST API accessed
| with HTTP. But if Maple supported a REST endpoint, bam, its a
| service.
|
| In this OPs example, the "service" API is email, not HTTP. But it
| achieves the same goal.
|
| What I think the OP misses is: who the heck wants to log on to
| the server and tweak the site content from the unix prompt when
| there is an API?
| sodimel wrote:
| I think it depends. For small, fast-writtent rants, txt files
| are great (my crap-computer-that-is-running-next-to-my-box
| didn't even burned when the post reached the front page of hn).
|
| I really see the point in not having to manage a whole big
| ecosystem by ourselves (I use gitlab, sometimes github). The
| rant was about using an interface on another website (not the
| email API) in order to submit a PR or an issue for updating a
| website. It's a standardized way of doing an edit (and it can
| be painful when you don't know github), and more and more
| websites are using it.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| > the rant was about using an interface on another website
|
| oh, i see. i overlooked that. thanks.
| fragmede wrote:
| That's a very specific definition for service. What's going to
| happen to that definition when technology eventually moves past
| using REST APIs?
|
| A program running on your school's mainframe that you access
| via some sort of terminal is a computing service from before
| the Internet.
|
| Plenty of people use a Unix prompt to access both local and
| remote computers. That its not your preferred method is fine,
| but there _are_ people out there that prefer it! If those
| command line tools are hitting the same API (eg using curl),
| what then?
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Yes, that is why I pointed out that "email" is also an API.
| Do you think a person reads the email in the OP's note? (not
| being sarcastic) I'm pretty sure it triggers an update
| through an IFTTT-like flow / post-hook on receive.
| XCSme wrote:
| In most cases, if you want to change something you can also send
| an e-mail with your desired changes, without registering on any
| platform.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| If you wanted to submit a change to a page back in the day, you
| e-mailed someone a patch. That required "signing up" for an
| E-mail account (unless you were a weirdo who telnetted to an smtp
| port and hand-crafted a mail delivery) and using someone's e-mail
| service, after you used a local application to craft the patch.
|
| The big difference today is that we don't use native apps, so we
| have to have accounts, to use _somebody else 's apps_ for free,
| because they want to track us and make money from us.
|
| On the web today, we don't use apps, we generate revenue for
| others via their apps.
| shitRETARDSsay wrote:
| "On the web today, we don't use protocols, we use applications"
| foolzcrow wrote:
| Avoid centralized services like with crypto.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Servers vs services is an odd way to frame this discussion.
|
| Seems like the specific problem is pull requests are not a core
| git feature in that they cannot be conveniently accomplished in a
| secure and decentralized way.
| megous wrote:
| How did you come to that idea?
|
| Pull request is common feature for maintainers in the Linux
| world, and they don't use github to send them to Linus.
|
| And on top of that they are secure (signed tags) and
| decentralized (maintainer can publish them anywhere)
| pnathan wrote:
| I had a choice a few years ago.
|
| I could have 5-8 NUCs/RPis, install a slew of conventional
| services I was curious about, and consider things like power,
| cooling, cables, storage.
|
| _or_
|
| I could pay GKE for a k8s cluster, install most of the things I
| was curious about, and avoid dealing with, e.g., corruption of
| the SD card. Or the cat knocking the desk-rack of NUCs off.
|
| since rack, stack, and on-prem issues are not what I was wanting
| to sort out, I chose to deal with what I wanted to learn, rather
| than rat-hole down data center admin issues.
|
| I've been doing this work for years and years and years. I was
| scrounging boxes from the CS department for research 15 years ago
| (or more). Servers are a fundamentally flawed unit of reliability
| and development. Moving to a design world where you design for
| someone to knock over the box and _the computation keeps going_
| is paradigmatically better.
|
| When you deal with forward looking people in the server-centric
| world and you show them a service / "keep going" world, their
| mind is blown and they want it IME.
| antihero wrote:
| I will say that in the most part I agree with you. It is better
| to live in a civilisation, pay tax, have the litter collected,
| the roads paved, rather than trying to roll your own.
|
| However, being able to, to varying degree, opt out of said
| civilisation when it runs counter to your ideals or becomes to
| authoritarian or means that existing within it could compromise
| what you believe in, is important. The cloud is great, but we
| must strive to have the skills to be self reliant so it is
| truly a choice to participate in it to the extent that we do.
| jasode wrote:
| _> On the web today, [...] In order to submit an edit for this
| page, I hosted all my code on microsoft's servers.[...]_
|
| I assume you're talking about people using Github instead of
| hosting their own server?
|
| But before Github, people also avoided hosting code on their own
| servers or paying $10/month for a datacenter VPS -- by using
| previous _services_ such as SourceForge or Codeproject.com.
|
| If a bunch of people need to do activities <X> and <Y> but <Y>
| has higher priority in life, then some other service conveniently
| doing <X> will emerge. That's what Github is... it's a natural
| emergent phenomenon arising from people not wanting to mess
| around with running self-hosted Gitlab on a laptop, or Raspberry
| Pi, or on a $10/month Digital Ocean droplet, etc.
| sodimel wrote:
| Agreed, perhaps the reason so many people use this service is
| because it may be because it solves a problem.
|
| But another approach (my point on the rant) is the "I don't
| want to know how things work, I just want them to work"
| approach, which I think more and more people are using these
| days (we can relate this to mechanics, where everything is
| getting more complex). Because things are getting more
| complicated under the hood but seem "easier" to understand
| (because we're adding piles of abstractions on top of piles of
| abstractions), fewer people tend to take the time to create
| things with the "old" technos and really learn how things
| works.
|
| (ps: this exact txt file is self-hosted on a dell optiplex
| fx160 with 4GB ram and an old processor, bought $20 in 2017 on
| ebay)
| simonw wrote:
| I know exactly how to self-host - I ran Trac for years -
| which is why I keep all of my projects on GitHub now.
|
| I know full well how much work it is to keep something like
| that maintained and secure and properly backed up.
|
| I also know how many things can go wrong - including nasty
| things like missing billing emails when a credit card expires
| and losing the associated instance.
|
| "GitHub, by default, writes five replicas of each repository
| across our three data centers to protect against failures at
| the server, rack, network, and data center levels" - I can't
| compete with that! https://github.blog/2021-03-16-improving-
| large-monorepo-perf...
| fragmede wrote:
| I also no longer self-host a number of services myself, but
| thanks to "the Cloud", it's fairly trivial to "write five
| replicas of each repository across our three data centers
| to protect against failures at the server, rack, network,
| and data center levels". Uploading data to AWS S3/other
| cloud storage (with some additional, but fairly trivial
| scripting on top) gets you that same level of redundancy -
| or better! I don't want to be the person on-call when my
| self-hosted server's hard drive dies in the middle of my
| vacation, among other reasons, are why I use eg, GitHub.
|
| There's an informed decision to be made when graduating
| from a computer in your basement, to a colo'd server, to
| using a VPS (or dedicated server) in the Cloud, to using a
| consumer facing online service. But if you're willing to
| have your data in the cloud, replication that used to take
| setting up multiple colo'd machines across the world (which
| I couldn't compete with, either) is fairly trivial these
| days. (A HA failover setup is left as an exercise to the
| reader.)
| sodimel wrote:
| I don't really know what to think for big, critical
| applications because I've never had to manage one myself. I
| can agree that looks very difficult and time-consuming, and
| that indeed companies devoted to the sole task of
| maintaining all the stack up and running are amazing.
|
| However, for small-scale projects, personal blogs or
| website, I really like the idea of self-hosting. Knowing
| that all the data are in my home is reassuring (apart from
| the fact that my house could catch fire).
|
| (I realized that you're one of the co-creators of Django;
| thank you very much for this masterpiece)
| fragmede wrote:
| _> apart from the fact that my house could catch fire_
|
| Your house feels like a fortress, until something happens
| to you or someone you know. Not just a natural disaster,
| like a hurricane, tornado, flood, or earthquake, but
| small disasters too. House fire, as you mentioned, or
| having your house burgled, some crazy power company
| glitch, or something as mundane as a child with a cup of
| water in exactly the wrong place. Even if you are
| meticulous enough to drive backups off-site backups, that
| somewhere is probably close enough that it's possible for
| a natural disaster to take out your house and your backup
| site. Encrypt your data and save it somewhere
| geographically far away, if it's really important to you.
| It's doable manually but for everybody else, imo, an
| online service (eg Dropbox or Google Drive) is easier,
| which means it's more likely to happen and not fall off
| the bottom of the Todo list.
| habeebtc wrote:
| I have thought about this some.
|
| I do prefer having local copies of everything, because I
| don't trust The Cloud. Malicious actors can get your
| account shut down, and then all your stuff is gone,
| locked up and the key thrown away.
|
| My solution has been to run a RAID 1 NAS device for all
| my local stuff (including all my media I want to stream
| in the house - nice having movies and TV when internet is
| down). 4TB drives, rated for NAS usage.
|
| Important documents, and sentimental photos (many GB's
| worth from the last few decades) I periodically back up
| onto an external SSD and put in my fire safe with
| physical documents of importance.
| jdlshore wrote:
| FYI, fire safes aren't necessarily waterproof. They'll
| protect your documents from the fire but not the
| firefighters' water, or the drop through the burned out
| floor to the basement. Mine, for example, requires an
| additional treatment to be waterproof. Something to keep
| in mind if you haven't already.
|
| (I keep my backups in three places: local drives, safe
| deposit box rotated quarterly, and BackBlaze. I've only
| ever needed the first, but I feel safer knowing I have
| the other two.)
| geofft wrote:
| > _Because things are getting more complicated under the hood
| but seem "easier" to understand (because we're adding piles
| of abstractions on top of piles of abstractions), fewer
| people tend to take the time to create things with the "old"
| technos and really learn how things works._
|
| That isn't necessarily true.
|
| I suspect the same _number_ of people are taking time to
| really learn how things work, but the abstractions are
| allowing _more people_ to get involved in writing and
| contributing to open-source software, developing services,
| etc., so the apparent fraction of people doing stuff on their
| own is lower. But if it weren 't for the abstractions, it's
| not that we'd have more people doing things under the hood,
| it's that we'd have people not doing them at all.
|
| I'm one of the folks who insists on knowing how things work
| under the hood, and it's an enormously valuable (and fun)
| professional skill, but it also frankly limits what I can do.
| I won't write projects in React because I don't really
| understand what React is doing and I don't feel comfortable
| with that, so my dashboards are cronjobs that template out
| some HTML and upload it to static hosting. (Which is fine, my
| job isn't making dashboards, my job is debugging prod
| systems.) Meanwhile my coworkers are throwing together
| incredibly impressive UIs very quickly. If it weren't for
| React, neither of us would be writing these UIs.
|
| I remember open-source development in the pre-GitHub days.
| There was, frankly, a whole lot less of it.
| milkers wrote:
| Yes, indeed we are.
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