Owncloud?

[Red Squirrel]

Anyone familiar with this? It looks very interesting.

http://owncloud.org/

It's like a cloud service, but it's self hosted.

 

[smakme7757]

I'm in the middle of planning a home deployment. We just got a 100/100 connection, so I'm planning on moving everything from dropbox to my "Owncloud".

I'm going to test it quite a bit first, but it's definitely looking like a promising project. I'm looking forward to getting stuck into it, but i haven't had time to start installing/configuring yet....So many projects, so little time!

 

[Scarpozzi]

To me, "Cloud" computing is basically another word for outsourcing your datacenter to a bigger datacenter and only paying for the bandwidth and or CPU cycles you use.

I know it ends up being far more complicated than that once you get into the application side, but typically what makes 'the cloud' desirable is that your bandwidth and data storage growth requirements are someone else's problem for a cheaper rate than expanding more localized infrastructure. Self-hosting would void anything I'd gain from deploying it.

Example: You decide to start a company. You pay Microsoft a monthly fee per user to host Office365 and provide your employees with Exchange and Office....rather than paying for a SAN, multiple servers, dedicated support, Server UPS, backup generator for the datacenter and air conditioning...not to mention real estate.


Owncloud looks like they're working to build a good platform to work with a bunch of different industries as long as enterprise-level support isn't required.

 

[smakme7757]

To me, "Cloud" computing is basically another word for outsourcing your datacenter to a bigger datacenter and only paying for the bandwidth and or CPU cycles you use.

I know it ends up being far more complicated than that once you get into the application side, but typically what makes 'the cloud' desirable is that your bandwidth and data storage growth requirements are someone else's problem for a cheaper rate than expanding more localized infrastructure. Self-hosting would void anything I'd gain from deploying it.

Example: You decide to start a company. You pay Microsoft a monthly fee per user to host Office365 and provide your employees with Exchange and Office....rather than paying for a SAN, multiple servers, dedicated support, Server UPS, backup generator for the datacenter and air conditioning...not to mention real estate.


Owncloud looks like they're working to build a good platform to work with a bunch of different industries as long as enterprise-level support isn't required.

That's pretty much how cloud computing is working today and it is more or less the general definition of the "Cloud". However (and this is just my opinion) I feel that "The Cloud" can be whatever you want it to be as it's merely a term describing a usage model of services which are currently available over the internet.

After reading about Owncloud I thought of it as a great platform to increase availability of my personal data (as a consumer and not a business) without having to use offsite services like Dropbox, Skydrive or Box.com.

Granted, your use case is based on your usage model that you defined when you wrote the post, but I can see that Owncloud would benefit business where offsite file storage services like those mentioned above are discouraged and where there is an outcry for such a service from employees.

You get the added security of having your data on-site or if not on-site then at least in a rack you control or have physical access to. The big bonus for employees would be availability.

But i do agree that the elasticity of cloud services are certainly what has made them so popular.

 

[lxskllr]

To me, "Cloud" computing is basically another word for outsourcing your datacenter to a bigger datacenter and only paying for the bandwidth and or CPU cycles you use.

I know it ends up being far more complicated than that once you get into the application side, but typically what makes 'the cloud' desirable is that your bandwidth and data storage growth requirements are someone else's problem for a cheaper rate than expanding more localized infrastructure. Self-hosting would void anything I'd gain from deploying it.

Example: You decide to start a company. You pay Microsoft a monthly fee per user to host Office365 and provide your employees with Exchange and Office....rather than paying for a SAN, multiple servers, dedicated support, Server UPS, backup generator for the datacenter and air conditioning...not to mention real estate.


Owncloud looks like they're working to build a good platform to work with a bunch of different industries as long as enterprise-level support isn't required.

But if you have a system which centralizes servers and the servers centralize their logs, then you are creating vast repositories of hierarchically organized data about people at the edges of the network that they do not control and, unless they are experienced in the operation of servers, will not understand the comprehensiveness of, the meaningfulness of, will not understand the aggregatability of.

So we built a network out of a communications architecture design for peering which we defined in client-server style, which we then defined to be the dis-empowered client at the edge and the server in the middle. We aggregated processing and storage increasingly in the middle and we kept the logs - that is, info about the flows of info in the Net - in centralized places far from the human beings who controlled or thought they controlled the operation of the computers that increasingly dominated their lives. This was a recipe for disaster.

This was a recipe for disaster. Now, I haven’t mentioned yet the word “cloud” which I was dealt on the top of the deck when I received the news that I was talking here tonight about privacy and the cloud.

I haven’t mentioned the word “cloud” because the word “cloud” doesn’t really mean anything very much. In other words, the disaster we are having is not the catastrophe of the cloud. The disaster we are having is the catastrophe of the way we misunderstood the Net under the assistance of the un-free software that helped us to understand it. What “cloud” means is that servers have ceased to be made of iron. “Cloud” means virtualization of servers has occurred.

So, out here in the dusty edges of the galaxy where we live in dis-empowered clienthood, nothing very much has changed. As you walk inward towards the center of the galaxy, it gets more fuzzy than it used to. We resolve now halo where we used to see actual stars. Servers with switches and buttons you can push and such. Instead, what has happened is that iron no longer represents a single server. Iron is merely a place where servers could be. So “cloud” means servers have gained freedom, freedom to move, freedom to dance, freedom to combine and separate and re-aggregate and do all kinds of tricks. Servers have gained freedom. Clients have gained nothing. Welcome to the cloud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA

 

[ShadowVVL]

Thanks lxskllr, that was a good video I enjoyed it.

 

[Scarpozzi]

That's pretty much how cloud computing is working today and it is more or less the general definition of the "Cloud". However (and this is just my opinion) I feel that "The Cloud" can be whatever you want it to be as it's merely a term describing a usage model of services which are currently available over the internet.

After reading about Owncloud I thought of it as a great platform to increase availability of my personal data (as a consumer and not a business) without having to use offsite services like Dropbox, Skydrive or Box.com.

Granted, your use case is based on your usage model that you defined when you wrote the post, but I can see that Owncloud would benefit business where offsite file storage services like those mentioned above are discouraged and where there is an outcry for such a service from employees.

You get the added security of having your data on-site or if not on-site then at least in a rack you control or have physical access to. The big bonus for employees would be availability.

But i do agree that the elasticity of cloud services are certainly what has made them so popular.

At home, I bought a NAS that has a small server platform available. It actually will do cloud backups if you want to backup the NAS to pay-per-gig services. I guess in my old age (yeah...I'm in my 30s), I've lost the desire to maintain a lot of extra infrastructure at home. It's just too much work reinventing the wheel when there are tons of free wheels available that don't cost me time/electricity to support.....and won't collect dust when I stop using them in 3 years.

 

[smakme7757]

At home, I bought a NAS that has a small server platform available. It actually will do cloud backups if you want to backup the NAS to pay-per-gig services. I guess in my old age (yeah...I'm in my 30s), I've lost the desire to maintain a lot of extra infrastructure at home. It's just too much work reinventing the wheel when there are tons of free wheels available that don't cost me time/electricity to support.....and won't collect dust when I stop using them in 3 years.

The extra infrastructure in my case is a single computer running a virtualization platform. Everything is useful, automated and extremely inexpensive for the amount of flexibility it provides.

Obviously the little black box in the cellar isn't for everybody. If you feel that a NAS fulfills your needs for yourself and your family, then I'm not going to try and convince you otherwise. A NAS will in most cases be more than enough for most families. Even more so now they are becoming more powerful and offer cloud backup as you mentioned above.

My comments on Owncloud were that it looks like decent platform to give business or consumers the ability to create thier own Dropboxish service which they control. The cloud is all about options and Owncloud is just another option.