They say trends follow a cycle and repeats every few decades. We see this in fashion, for example with pants, in the 80’s baggy JNCO jeans were in style. As time progressed skinny jeans and alt-rock grew in popularity. And now we are back into vintage baggy jeans.
Computing follows trends as well. We democratized mainframe computing in with the advent of the Personal Computer. And with broadband internet reaching ubiquiry every household had at least one PC.
Then, around 2010, smart phones began to be popular. Most people had an Android or iPhone in their pockets. “The Cloud” became a household term and our smartphones became shiny thin clients. We have moved back to mainframe computing.
In today’s age, we’re still deeply rooted in the cloud and the mainframe mentality. However many are becoming tired of this computing model.
The cloud brought with it loss of ownership, data harvesting, enshittification. Technical users began to decouple themselves bringing about the “self-hosted” trend.
For those self hosting, they’re all working towards one common ideal. They’re all working towards their own Personal Cloud.
I believe firmly that we are at the advent of the next PC revolution. However this time the “C” means “Cloud”.
The Personal Cloud will not reach ubiquity without help though. We need to make things more approachable than ZFS, Docker Compose files, and Helm charts. What everyday users need is an appliance. They need something they can plug in, browse to 192.168.1.2/setup, enter their credentials, and start installing server applications
Security is now both very important, and very hard to get right. Plex does this well for the most part. They offer a proxy that brings single sign on to all Plex users. Plex users don’t need to configure a reverse proxy, they just enable remote access on their server and its safely accessible from the public web.
How would something like this look for a “Personal Cloud” appliance?
The vision
I see the first Personal Cloud appliance as something that closely resembles a NAS. It doesn’t need a ton of drive bays, but it needs enough. A user should easily get redundancy for their data without knowing what “redundancy” means.
The Personal Cloud should give the user an email that can be changed later. The user will be defaulted to the domain of the supplier. However they, can switch to their own domain down the road when they buy one.
This email should be used with an identity provider that is configured in the background for them. The IDP provides single sign and RBAC for their entire personal cloud.
The user will want to install apps, they don’t care about the implementation, they want to know the name of an app, what it does. They want to hit “install” and be given a URL from which they can reach their application.
Finally, the user will want to back up their photos and data. They want it to be safe from hackers, and they want it to be safe from data loss. These users may not know what a secure backup strategy is, and storage is expensive.
They may opt to get bigger drives to stick into their PC, or they may pay a monthly fee to rent additional remote storage from a storage provider. Because they are their precious memories, once they select a storage provider they are very unlikely to switch.
Finally, the user will want social media, they will want a personal website and a presence on the web. The PC should host both the users personal website, something like a linktree. And it should serve a social media profile so they can interact with others.
I believe in a future where every household has a PC again. And the internet is made healthy again through the realization if a more distributed internet. One where everyone has their own cloud and these clouds are interlaced in a social manner.
Defining a Personal Cloud
No one’s going to make a Personal Cloud without a clear vision. Let’s talk about how a Personal Cloud may be implemented.
At a bare minimum one would need:
- A host to run OCI containers.
- An IDP and Single Sign-on solution
- A reverse proxy
- A secure storage solution
- A secure backup solution
- An automation runner / executor
- An easy to use app store with templates to share common configuration across applications and services.
- Easy to setup and configure for non-technical users. Think about the easiest WiFi router you have setup, or use the Home Assistant setup process as a “compass”.
Realizing a Personal Cloud
There is a strong community around self-hosted applications, however they all operate relatively independently. Realizing a Personal Cloud that anyone can use will require building the “glue” that can help make all of these services interoperate in a manner that is intuitive for the user.