Self-hosted infrastructure is the first step toward voluntary apotheosis.
–Unknown
When people think of The Cloud(tm), they think of ubiquitous computing. Whatever you need, whenever you need it’s there from the convenience of your mobile, from search engines to storage to chat. However, as the latest Amazon and Cloudflare outages have demonstrated all it takes is a single glitch to knock out half the Internet as we know it.
This is, as they say, utter bollocks. Much of the modern world spent a perfectly good day that could have been spent procrastinating, shitposting, and occasionally doing something productive bereft of Slack, Twitter, Autodesk, Roku, and phone service through Vonage. While thinking about this fragile state of affairs in the shower this morning I realized that, for the somewhat technically inclined and their respective cohorts there are ways to mitigate the risks of letting other people run stuff you need every day. Let us consider the humble single board computer, computing devices the size of two decks of cards at most, a €1 coin at the very least. While this probably won’t help you keep earning a paycheque it would help you worry less about the next time Amazon decides to fall on its face.