When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon.
tl;dr: Network Administration 101. SSH is an application-layer protocol. Just because it provides an 'easy' path to encrypted remote filesystem access doesn't mean it's a one-size-fits-all solution.
Just because *nix hosts treat everything as a file doesn't mean all networking can be handled via remote filesystem access (ex windows hosts, network hardware, etc).
SSH is an application-layer protocol. VPN provides access at multiple layers of the networking stack depending on the protocol used (ex PPTP, L2TP).
For instance, if you need to remotely activate all the machines on a remote network for maintenance. A simple approach is to broadcast a WOL (Wake-On-Lan) packet to the remote subnet. Due to WOL being a Layer 2 protocol, this is not possible using SSH alone.
Same goes for remote monitoring the status/health of a remote network via SNMP traps (also Layer 2).
Remote router/switch configuration, packet analysis, and many other lower level administration tasks require access to the lower layers of the network stack. All of which can be accomplished over a VPN but not SSH.
As for the reasoning behind using HTTPS, see my other comment. SSH access should only be granted to 'trusted' clients and it's usually a good idea to disable it when a 'safe' alternative is available.
So this is just a dev wanting to scratch an itch issue and/or arrogance and/pr ignorance?
I always wondered why there was a separate layer for VPN's when you can so easily use ssh for a VPN at least for a secure way to use the internet. I suppose if you want it for the act of "being" on a remote network as if you are local is a VPN advantage, but I'm pretty sure ssh has a way to make that happen as well.
If I get this correct, it is a good idea to use ssh as a chat app's security methods?
I shall let Rob Pike explain :
When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon.
http://rob.pike.usesthis.com/