
The Dangerous Folly of “Software as a Service” - signa11
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8338
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quickthrower2
It's not that proprietary or SaaS (PaaS, Iaas, etc.) is bad, it is a case of
thinking through what you will do when (not if!) the provider decides to shut
you down.

You can get shut down for any number of reasons, and you may not know why.
Google is renowned for closing accounts so you lose everything laterally where
you rely on the G, Paypal is renowned for freezing money for months. A cloud
provider shut us down at work for a day because we got dished up a IP that
someone else had abused minutes earlier. So yeah whoever you use, eventually
and problematically they will f' you over. They will give you down time (temp
or permanent) and/or they'll leak your data.

So with that in mind you need mitigation. Not necessarily run your own racks
full of only GNU software on open source schematic hardware using batteries &
solar panels, but bear in mind what to do if the provider messes you up. For
somethings you might have it tuned up beautifully where a DNS entry with a 60s
TTL switches you over from AWS to Azure and it's all running nicely again, and
you set up DO as your next fallback.

For other things, it might be a case of 'well we will need an engineer to port
it all over, might take 1-2 hours but we know how to do it'. Whatever it is it
needs planning.

Of course it's horses for courses, and most start ups would weigh up the risk
of being hung to dry by their SaaS versus the much higher risk of simply not
succeeding financially.

But boycotting cloud / SaaS might be a business mistake. However if you are
doing it for philosophical reasons I guess that is different.

~~~
quickthrower2
Timely:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077421)

