Why I Dont Trust the Cloud (And You Shouldnt Either)
Every time someone says “just put it in the cloud” I involuntarily twitch.
I dont trust the cloud. The cloud is just someone else’s computer, and Ive seen what people do with their own computers. You really want your critical infrastructure living on the same machine someone used to torrent a bootleg copy of Microsoft Office 2010 in 2014?
No thank you. I’ll take my chances with the server I built in my closet that I have to manually restart with a paperclip every third Tuesday.
The Incident
Last year a SaaS I relied on went down for six hours. Six. Hours. Do you know what I did during those six hours? I sat in the dark and stared at my home server like it was a newborn child. Because my homelab was still running. Because of course it was. It runs on spite and thermal paste.
Thats when I knew.
I needed to become the cloud.
My Current Setup
- Email: Self-hosted (I spend more time fighting spam filters than reading emails, but at least the spam is MY spam)
- Git: Self-hosted (nobodys merging to my main branch except me and god)
- DNS: Self-hosted (I have opinions about resolvers, you dont want to know)
- Backups: Self-hosted (also backed up to a different service I dont trust any more but at least theres redundancy)
- Mental health: Not self-hosted. Thats in someone elses cloud. I think AWS us-east-1 runs my serotonin at this point.
The Breaking Point
The moment I knew I’d gone too far was when I found myself writing a custom Terraform provider for my toaster because I wanted it to be “orchestrated.”
The toaster makes toast. Thats it. It doesn’t need a health check endpoint.
I gave it one anyway.
Moral of the story: The cloud is fine. I’m the one who’s broken.