I was thinking about an alternative way to look at “the cloud”, maybe the public clouds should be at most a utility for bandwidth and availability, not for truth or logic.
Calling this “hollow cloud” architecture.
Disposable frontends
Your cloud infrastructure must be treated as completely ephemeral. If your cloud server vanishes, is seized, or burns down, you should lose zero data. The cloud is merely a cache layer for the home. The master data should never originate on the cloud.
Home storage
In that vein, you do not pay rent for storage; you pay rent for reach. We use the cloud to route packets, not to hold value.
Async sovereignty
Personal servers must not be online 24/7/365. The hollow cloud architecture handles “Home Offline” states gracefully. The cloud buffers requests & the home processes them when it wakes up. This enables low-power modes, solar-powered servers, and disconnection without disruption.
Trust no relay
Because the cloud is “dumb,” it should also be “blind”. Logic processed at home is encrypted before it is sent to the cloud for display. The cloud relay should ideally not know what it is serving, only who it is serving it to.
Start today
You can get started with a mini PC or with the computer you already have. Try to architect (using an LLM or manually), a service that would respect the above. I look forward to your experiment.