As the world moves toward AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, I would like to take a moment to reflect on areas where the cloud services maybe aren’t so strong.

Connectivity/Availability

While the popular cloud services are the best in the world at availability and reliability, if your application requires those qualities at a particular location, your service will only be as reliable as your Internet connection. For businesses, high-quality, redundant connections are readily available. For IoT-in-the-home, you’re relying on the typical home broadband connection and hardware. I won’t be connecting my door locks to that.

When disaster strikes, every layer of your application is a possible crippling fault line. This is especially the case when your application relies on services spread across the Internet. We saw an example of this recently when AWS experienced a hiccup that was felt around the world. The more tightly we integrate with services the world over, the more we rely on everything in the world maintaining stability.

Latency and Throughput Performance

If latency is important, locality is key. Physics can be difficult that way. Many attempts at cloud gaming have fallen apart because of this simple fact. Other applications can be similarly sensitive.

Likewise with bandwidth, even the best commercial connections are unlikely to achieve 10Gbps to the Internet. If your requirements stress the limitations of modern technology, the typical cloud services may not work for you.

Security

While the cloud providers themselves are at the cutting edge in security practices, the innumerable cloud services and IoT vendors built atop them often aren’t. Because of the ubiquity that the cloud model presents, it’s getting more difficult to find vendors that are willing to provide on-premise alternatives — alternatives that could be more secure by virtue of never shuffling your data through the Internet.

There’s also the simple fact that by using cloud services, you’re involving another party in the storage and manipulation of your data. The DoD types will certainly give this due consideration, but events like CelebGate (1 and 2) are indications that maybe more of us should. Every new online account we create is another door into our lives, and the user/password protected doors aren’t the most solid.

Another concern along these lines is legal access to your data. If you’ve shared data with a cloud provider, can it be legally disclosed without your knowledge via warrant? Can foreign governments request access to any data stored within their borders? These issues are still being worked out with somewhat varying results around the globe. This might be an even smaller concern to the typical user, especially for those of us in the US. However, I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t note that politics of late have gotten…interesting.

Precision Metrics

I haven’t heard about this problem recently, but it has been noted that it’s difficult to get good concrete metrics out of at least some of the large scale cloud providers. Software failures can occur for reasons that are invisible to the virtualization layer: poor node performance due to throttling of nodes in particular locations, odd behaviors manifesting between two VMs using resources in unexpected ways, etc. Good luck getting the hardware metrics needed to debug these from the cloud providers.

Cost

This is fast becoming a non-issue as prices race toward zero. However, at the time of writing, those AWS bills could still add up to a significant chunk of change. Delivering the kind of reliability that the cloud titans provide isn’t easy, and the cost can often be worth it.

Custom Hardware

This is a fairly extreme case, but customization with the big services is rough unless you’ve got significant cash to throw at the problem.

Scale

If you’re already the size of Amazon or larger (Facebook), you’re probably better off doing something that works for you. I don’t imagine many will be in this position.

 

There you have it. The best set of reasons I have for avoiding the cloud.

If none of those reasons apply to you, and high-availability, high-reliability, available-everywhere is what you need, nothing beats the cloud computing providers. They’re ubiquitous, generally easy to use and automate, and are getting cheaper every day. Sometimes you can even get better deals with specialized services like Bluehost or SquareSpace, but beware the drawbacks.

However, if you have a concern along any of the lines above, it’s at least worthwhile to take a second look.