What is your favorite Cloud Platform?

that we all must necessarily think cloud is a good thing and want to use it.
Not me, I value my privacy.

The occasional outages and stories of lost mail archives of some very large providers make me worry. Frankly, I don't trust the Cloud providers to be stable enough over the long-term. Companies merge, get bought, go bust, etc., and any of these events could cause a temporary or permanent service disruption, terms of usage policy change, security problem, total loss of data, etc. If you move your data to the cloud, then you must accept that you are giving up a great deal of control. You must consider how mission critical the data is, how you are going to make/keep backups, the cost of losing access temporarily/permanently, etc.

For some types of data, this may not be a problem. But, for me, the Cloud is just too flaky for the type of data I'd like to store in it. Would you be comfortable if your Cloud data got given to Wikileaks, or, worse, to some criminal organization. Your provider might not even tell (or even know) you if this occurs, especially since they are not legally required to in may countries. Call me paranoid, but disgruntled employees of large corporations can do bad things; and you have no control over how those employees are vetted or treated. Your provider might be fine now, but what happens when the provider is bought by say, Walmart, and costs get cut to the bone.

I realize my date center won't scale as nicely as, say, Amazon's, but I'm not (yet) prepared to let someone else be responsible for the safety and security of MY data.

It's the latest IT fad. Some tech marketing demon creates these fads to make the old new again and then profit.

Here's how to make $$$ in IT:

1. Look back to the 70s and find some mainframe tech
2. Use Interet to duplicate functionality and give it cutsie name
3. Profit!

Those are cloud platforms as well!

> So you store your /. postings on your own hard drive?

Have you considered the possibility that he does not view his /. postings as "private"?

My favorite cloud platform is a Linux server I have in my closet. It runs several externally exposed KVM Linux instances, and doesn't have any costs or limitations associated with any of the other options (well, other than 30 bucks a year I pay for electricity to run this server). 4TB of combined storage, Two cores fully at my disposal, each instance has 2GB of RAM allocated to it. This would cost an arm and a leg if I got it from Amazon.