27 january 2021
The following is a bit of a ramble that's been rattling around in my head for a while. The concepts are probably ones that are familiar to townies, but I'm also inputting text to screen here to help with focusing those ideas and getting them out into the ether.
The cloud is other people's computers.
That phrase keeps sticking in my mind, but the important piece of it is that the cloud is computers that other people own. And those other people are not giving you access to their computers out of the kindness of their hearts. They want to use their resources to make as much money as they can. They accomplish this through a few key tactics that are important to recognize.
The freemium model is probably the most obvious. You become reliant upon a certain service that is free to a point, and then becomes something you have to pay for if you exceed certain metrics. Dropbox and Google Drive do this, to an extent. You get an amount of data storage that you can use for free, but if you exceed that cap, we're going to want to charge you a bit for your data.
Then there's the moving goalposts model. Your data cap is currently 50GB, but starting at arbitrary date we are going to make it 25GB and start charging you for the overage. It's a common tactic paired with the above model, and it's hard for users to get away from. You're already comfortable with their infrastructure, so it's a no brainer to just keep with them and pay the small amount of money they're asking to hold onto your data.
Which leads nicely into analytics. Cloud companies are all about analytics. Every concievable piece of how you are interacting with their software is being recorded, aggregated, and scrutinized with the purpose of figuring out how best to make money from you and others. It's interesting to me that people are often so focused on keeping the content of their data private, they don't realize that one of the biggest money makers for companies is the anayltics around the data. It's also pretty key in terms of police and other surveillance - what you've actually said isn't as important a lot of the times as who you're saying it to.
So, what to do? It helps to know some of these things, and keep in mind that there's no such thing as a free cloud service, just as there's no such thing as a free lunch. There's some ways that you can get away from the cloud -- I've been working on a personal project to get my family's storage out of the cloud and into something that we have real direct control over while retaining the ubiquity and utility that cloud providers give.