It is time to reclaim the cloud: Tunnel computing

Cloud computing. What is it? Wikipedia describes it with this image:




So, us clients sit at the edges and consume (and pay for) services provided in the center by Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others.

Does it have to be this way? No! But scalability, redundancy, performance, etc? Sure, some cloud services will remain on the net, but we can take control of many of them, for free. It is easy to be impressed by the sheer massiveness of the server farms Google and others are building. For example, the number of servers maintained by Google is estimated to be about 450,000. But we need to put this in perspective, as 487,180 computers were sold in the third quarter in Sweden alone! Sure, a Google server is probably more powerful than an average computer sold in Sweden, but Google's servers are hard at work, while our machines are mostly idling!

As an example, lets look at cloud based backups. I currently use the 2 GB free Dropbox service. Very useful, I just drop my files into a special folder and they get backed up on remote servers. I only have two problems with it:

1. The backup servers are in the US. I'm sure the US government knocks on their doors every now and then, asking Dropbox staff to hand over client files. Sorry, I will not tolerate that in the future. My files are my files!
2. 2 GB is just too little. I can buy a 1 TB disk these days for 850 SEK (120 USD, 80 EUR). We're talking less than pocket change for 2 GB!
   

Both of these problems go away if we create our own cloud. What are the benefits?

1. We'd encrypt our own files before they hit the net, with our own keys, so our files remain for our eyes only.
2. We get to have hundreds of GB of disk each backed up on our shared cloud.

If I look at the files I back up on a regular basis, they can be divided into a few groups:

1. Music, about 30 GB
2. Private photos, about 10 GB
3. Private family videos, about 10 GB
4. Email, about 5 GB
5. Various documents and files, about 3 GB

It is no big deal if the music gets lost, because I have the original disks at home. So, actually, I'd prefer to just send them out to the cloud for everyone to share. What remains is less than 30 GB of files that I really don't want to lose. I think my case is quite typical, unless you're into ripping DVDs. I'm not.

For backup I buy a new external USB drive every year or so. It just isn't cost effective to spend time cleaning old drives of backup files. Just buy a new one and start over. Setting up a NAS is compelling, but still doesn't save your files in case your NAS, or heaven forbid your whole house, burns down. For such cases cloud based backup is the only way to go.

I am a programmer and keep a free service on the net as a hobby project, the Universal Packing List. I've been thinking of converting it to the Google App Engine, but I'd prefer to host it myself. I could install my own server and use DynDNS, but I'd like to see a future when I can drop my application into our shared cloud and have it served by whatever computer is closest to the end user, without me having to care at all.

As I've described before on this blog, this shared cloud would actually be a shared private darknet, so perhaps the best word for this would be mole tunnel (or wormhole) computing. We'd connect with trusted peers and use our shared computers to deliver the computing and storage muscles needed. To the outside world it wouldn't be visible, since all is hidden in our shared tunnels.

We need to develop lots of machinery for this to work, and I only have the skills to do some myself. Who's interested?