What to worry about when you leave the cloud
Saturday, October 22, 2022
So nothing much happened this week except that the only tech company in Chicago announced that they are leaving the cloud.
https://www.rework.fm/leaving-the-cloud/
https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47e0
And they haven't quite done that yet, but everyone is cheering them on because the cloud is a stupid myth made by far west coast extremists to sell you on this idea that your computer in your pocket is useless against their massive army of computers that they are provisioning for you.
They will be able to do it, because you can definitely get a stable IP address if you pay enough for it. Or you can just do a reverse proxy into an unstable IP address and run hey.com from the expensive cellular telephone in DHH's back pocket.
It doesn't really take much to run a website that does things when you click it.
But what hey.com really needs to worry about, I think is email deliverability if they leave the cloud.
For eight years from 2014 - 2022 I ran my own email server, and yes it was in the cloud, and what I discovered around the time the Soviet Civil War started was that I was no longer able to email anyone at all. All of the big tech companies had blocked every other IP address except each other. There was no way through! I could not email anyone!
Which was fine with me for about six months, because I didn't want to email anyone. But then one day I imagined it would probably be best if I reopened my own personal economy a bit and to do that I needed to get an email address from a big-ish tech company. I didn't want to pay for hey.com because that seemed too expensive for me. So I went with Namecheap's "private email" which seems to deliver just fine.
Maybe for 37 Signals this will not be a problem because they are known. But for those of us who are unknown or big tech does not want to know us, when we leave the cloud the biggest issue with leaving is the cloud doesn't want anything to do with our email.
And yes I did DKIM and DMARC and had it all configured properly. You simply cannot host your own email server anymore because all of the big tech companies block everyone except each other and a few "middle sized" tech companies. There is no way in unless you are with the in crowd.
So yes, let's run all of our programs in our pockets and in our bedrooms! But you gotta understand if you go against the cloud then it goes against you.