Last September, I was thinking of the hold and power that today's cloud providers have (okay, I can name the big two, AWS and Azure) and their relation with the free and open source software movements. We, as people and businesses, are trusting more and more of our computation to them. And sometimes we have no choice, for example, when we use a third-party service that uses them.
Naturally, the big cloud providers do their best to cater to our desires. It's good business and the cloud industry brings big money. Less good is that they also try to lock us in on their platforms with proprietary services like a particular implementation of AI as a service. I can also think of particular business practices, not always commendable. considering other points as well, a question popped in my mind: what if we, as in the FOSS movements, could design a more friendly version of a big cloud, that would not lock everyone and also be great for the free software ecosystem?
Mind that I'm not discussing the merits of the services provided by big cloud. They are undeniably valuable. What I'd like to explore is an alternative to them. It's important to have choices, to not depend on big providers you if choose not to. It may be not the most convenient way to do it, but convenience is beside the point. I could discuss at length what excess convenience is doing to the world, but let's focus here on a libre cloud design. This is a pipe dream, probably not practical on many points, but maybe there's something valuable that someone can pick up? Let's go on with the fantastic notion of a libre cloud.
Bare bones libre cloud ideas
As with anything complex, we need to start simple. I don't believe it's desirable to copy, even if possible, feature-by-feature what the big guys offer. Frankly, some services are little more than money grabbers. It would serve us best to concentrate on a few core services first, make them usable fast and expand slowly. We are not beholden to the wishes of any large investors here.
As a second point, I believe it would be best to design business governance in a way that if a competitor copied everything our cloud do, that would strengthen our ecosystem. Therefore, in the spirit of free software, copies are encouraged!
Starting with the core services that a libre cloud needs to provide, that's what I thought (thanks to ideas bouncing in the fediverse as well):
- Hosted git integrated with project management tools
- CI/CD
- Database as a service
- Storage (object, cold, etc.)
- Authentication
- CDN for static files
- Easy local dev environment
- Servless edge computing
After that, we add more, like load balancing, routing, etc.
For the governance point, I got several ideas. I realize they could be impractical, but they're a starting point.
- Try hard to use copyleft code licenses. The reason is straightforward: if you use, and modify libre cloud software, you are strengthening the whole
- Maximum extent possible use of libre design hardware. In an ideal world, we would get datacentres filled with the likes of Risc V and Open Power
- Open protocols, open schematics for the possible data centers. It reminds me of now old Facebook initiative, Open Compute.
- Maximum privacy transparency possible (things like law enforcement requests, telemetry)
- Contribute to several free/open source projects, upstream, downstream, whatever makes sense, with not only code but sometimes money too
- It's possible that the very first entity to implement the services of a libre cloud nature needs to be a non-profit corporation, or a special-purpose corporation or a cooperative
Give back, join the federation!
The most radical notion, business-wise, is that we should welcome people to copy our practices and software. Maybe it's possible to design a decentralized "federation" of libre cloud providers. What does this mean?
It means that any participant in this federation will have a common, basic set of capabilities that make any two clouds interchangeable. If a customer is not happy with his instance, it's trivial to pack bags and switch, no lock-in thanks. It should also be possible for two instances to cooperate on resources. Each instance could advertise, in a manifesto, what its capabilities are. Say you need CDN, and your instance has presence in Europe, but not in Asia. Your instance could reach out, transparently to another federation member in Asia and use their CDN. Hard to coordinate software and financial side, but what a cool notion!
There it is, my crazy ideas about a cloud provider. How awesome if someone could implement even a fraction of this?