[Freedombox-discuss] How to deal with uptime and connectivity issues

[Michael Blizek]

Hi!

On 20:12 Tue 01 Mar     , Matt Willsher wrote:
> On 1 March 2011 18:13, Michael Blizek <
> michi1 at michaelblizek.twilightparadox.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hi!
> >
> > On 04:52 Tue 01 Mar     , Felipe Sanches wrote:
> > > SaaS users usually benefit from high availability provided by
> > professional
> > > datacenters. Data is often stored redundantly.
> >
> > In if the datacenter operator looses motivation to host you, you will spend
> > days to find and set up an alternative. That is, if you have made your own
> > backup, because backups in the datacenter will be unaccessable...
> >
> 
> The future of cloud, if it's to stay around, is standardisation which will
> allow seamless migration between providers.

I do not think so. What you are talking about is managed hosting, not cloud.

Cloud means the providers are running their code, not yours. In most cases
they will not share it and you are lucky if they allow selected partners to
access their proprietary API. Anybody who wants to provide a similar service
can start programming it from scratch.

> > > How will we deal with those issues in the scenario of a single plug per
> > user
> > > tied to a power outlet? Are we expecting people to have multiple
> > > freedomboxes kept in sync? I foresee people unplugging someone else's
> > boxes
> > > in order to use the power outlet.
> >
> > I do not think we should worry too much about these issues.
> >
> 
> I don't think we do for 0.1, or even 1.0 but users are beginning to expect
> reliability in their services.
> 
> Much of the benefits the that were or still are the mainstay of the
> enterprise are available to people free it they can be
> correctly architectured. I think the FB should leverage redundancies where
> possible. Given  the price point target of 29USD its not infeasible to
> provide very high uptime through a cloud like structure to the FBs. A UPS,
> two FBs and 99.99999% uptime can be yours ;)

If you just want to build a HA-pair of 2 devices: It does not help you much.
Your next single point of failure is your internet connection. The next is
other people kidnapping your devices. You also have to deal with stuff like
the split-brain problem. A better may would be a P2P network which can cache
your content, like GNUnet does. But this requires every client to support the
protocol. While certainly desireable, I do not think this is feasible. That is
unless you do not mind having many people who are unable to access your
content.

	-Michi
-- 
programing a layer 3+4 network protocol for mesh networks
see http://michaelblizek.twilightparadox.com