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by Elliotte Rusty Harold.
Original Post: You Can’t Trust the Cloud
Feed Title: Mokka mit Schlag
Feed URL: http://www.elharo.com/blog/feed/atom/?
Feed Description: Ranting and Raving
We’re not discontinuing the Red Light District because we no longer believe in the freedom to create your own social network for anything as long as it’s legal. We do. Practically though, supporting adult networks no longer makes sense. Here is what we’ve seen in practice to date with respect to adult social networks on Ning:
Adult social networks don’t pull their own weight. Specifically, they require other social networks to work harder because they don’t generate enough advertising or premium service revenue to cover their costs. Plus, our ad partners aren’t big fans of the adult networks and therefore require us to identify adult networks or risk our healthy advertising revenue. We don’t want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that’s where this is heading.
In other words, Ning just decided to cut off people who’d built sites on top of their platforms, because, hey, they felt like it. The pornography just wasn’t as profitable as they expected.
This isn’t the first time this has happened either. FaceBook and Apple have also shut down useful and popular applications because they just didn’t like them. The only safe and sensible course for anyone running a web site/web application/blog is:
Own your own domain name.
Own your own servers.
Own your software (or use standard open source software).
You can use a hosting service if you like, but keep a regular, complete, offsite backup.
Be ready to move ISPs at any time for any reason. Even if you don’t piss off your cloud provider, technical and business failures can and do shut down dependent customers.
Under no circumstances should you build any serious application on top of a vendor owned and controlled platform be it Ning, Amazon S3, Google AppEngine, FaceBook, the iPhone AppStore, MySpace, or anything similar. The companies that own these platforms can and will pull the rug out from under you when it’s convenient or profitable for them to do so.
Don’t believe me? Have you actually read their terms of service? For example, here’s one of several juicy bits from Amazon’s terms of service:
We may suspend your right and license to use any or all Paid Services (and any associated Amazon Properties) other than Amazon FPS and Amazon DevPay, or terminate this Agreement in its entirety (and, accordingly, cease providing all Services to you), for any reason or for no reason, at our discretion at any time by providing you sixty (60) days’ advance notice in accordance with the notice provisions set forth in Section 15 below.
Well, at least you get 60 days notice before they shut you off, right? Nope. Another section of the terms of service allows Amazon to unilaterally change the terms with only 15 days notice, including the section that requires them to give you 60 days notice. And in fact, if you read a little closer, they can do it with zero days notice, simply by redefining their acceptable use policy. And I’m using the term “notice” very loosely. They aren’t actually required to tell you that they’ve changed the terms of service.
Want to negotiate something different? Call them up and offer to pay for a contract in which they accept liability for their failures. Wait a few minutes for the laughter to die down before they hang up the phone.
Amazon is of course not at all unique. I could have picked any of the services mentioned above and found similar.
Perhaps some hackers are working in a garage right now to develop a fully open source cloud platform that enables you to backup and migrate all your data to servers you or someone else control at any time. I look forward to seeing it. However, until those hackers release their work, you’re better off sticking with the tried and true LAMP stack. Traditional payware like Oracle, Perforce, and Microsoft Office had lockin issues, but at least you controlled the software. Vendors couldn’t (usually) shut you down just because they decided your app no longer fit their business model. Cloud vendors can, and you have little to no recourse when they do.
First they came for the pornographers, and I did not speak up because I was not a pornographer. Then they came for the terrorist sympathizers, and I did not speak up because I wasn’t a terrorist sympathizer. Then they came for the hackers, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a hacker. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up.
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