Divesting from The Cloud™ Part 1: Why?

I've recently begun a quest to reduce my reliance on The Cloud™ in my everyday life. I'm trying to minimize and ultimately eliminate any sort of dependence on any cloud service or subscription without loosing any of the convenience or features those services provide.

For a full explanation/rant/my position on The Cloud™ I’ll be posting that in a separate article.

Why am doing this? Well, because it sounds fun and I like the idea of not being entirely at the mercy of someone else for the efficiency or convenience of my daily life and work flow. Do you ever hear your self saying, “just when I get used to something, it changes” or have you ever incorporated some product or service into your life and suddenly it goes away? Maybe the company got sold to another company, or maybe leadership changed, or the business model no longer worked out. Maybe that free service you relied on starting becoming unusable due to ads or becomes too expensive.

What if that $400 doorbell, $500 thermostat or $1000 camera system becomes a paperweight 9 months after you bought it because the company providing those cloud services that make your devices work and easy to use just stops supporting that hardware? On a bit more serious note, what about security breeches? What about hacks, or disgruntled employees that have access to your information or content? What about wars? Political conflicts?

Yeah, I don’t want to live in that world either. So this is my plan. I don’t want to give up anything, but I also want to control my own destiny. If I want to verify that my wine fridge is holding perfect 54F without getting up and walking over to the fridge, I don’t want anything stopping me.

The goal here is simple, if I unplugged my internet connection, I don’t want my daily life or workflow to change all that much. I still want access to all my data, I still want to remote control my thermostat, I still want to have security cameras, shared data services, backups and disaster recovery. If I still have services in a cloud service somewhere, I want to know that it’s strictly convenience and I can live without it, or that I can easily bring that functionality in-house and continue as though nothing happened.

This series of posts will be pretty tech-heavy, but I’ll keep it as high-level as I can. I hope someone enjoys it.