Cloud-based computing

[Burke Ingraffia]

Does anyone know of any companies that are religious-friendly that compete with AWS and other cloud-computing companies? I am concerned that we will all become dependent upon secular companies.

Burke Ingraffia

[Thomas Randall]

I think Father Z is trying to address this very issue with the idea of the Catholic Signal Corps.   Both in terms of hosting, but also in supporting ministries with technical needs.

[Beth Nicol]

the FAMVIN network offers website hosting at a fairly low cost to groups that fall under the Vincentian Family umbrella. But, we do use a dedicated server from a regular company (Pair.com). I want a provider that is up to snuff on security and current on OS and applications. As a long time SysAdmin, I know how tough that can be to maintain. So, I prefer to go with a company that knows their stuff. Even if you go with a "religion-friendly" company, I would bet that if you look into where they source their cloud offerings, you're going to find an Amazon or Google or other "secular" company upstream.

[Jeff Geerling]

Yeah; someone in the comments on that Fr. Z post mentioned Flocknote for communications, and I'm pretty sure their backend uses AWS.

Judging by the recent debates raging over Cloudflare deplatforming a site called KiwiFarms from their CDN for certain content hosted on it, plus all the general discontent, it seems like 'freedom' and private companies' obligations to society will be a pretty hot issue in the coming years. Especially anyone who deals with user-generated content (social networks, content distribution networks, blogs with comments, forums...).

There are already people pushing to ban things like right-to-life groups from certain platforms.

I think if you wanted something truly shielded against all that, it would have to be a tier-1-level provider, and someone would need to build data centers and connect to Internet hubs. And even there, we can see how sanctions can limit one's ability to get certain hardware and software (which is one reason I'm a staunch OSS/FOSS proponent... though open source hardware is a lot harder to do, since manufacturing is tightly limited).

99% of hosting companies these days are just providing an abstraction layer over access to one of the major providers/colocation facilities, and skimming a little off the top.

To provide true independence would take an extremely significant investment. And I'm just thinking in terms of hardware and facilities. Just getting a few dozen reliable tech-oriented Catholics capable of running infrastructure and building/maintaining the platform would be a Herculean task. Last time I worked for anything relating to the Church directly, I was burned out on internal politics and roadblocks to any type of change, and I had to get out of it to preserve my faith and relationship with Jesus! It would take a lot (not just money, heh... that's a secondary concern) to convince me to go back into that type of environment.

-Jeff

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[Bronius Motekaitis]

Jeff, you always bring the sage wisdom from tried (and apparently "trying!") experience.

This conversation topic is academically interesting. I don't know how serious OP was about "I want to get off the grid," but if he is that serious, yes it seems like it would be a "herculean" effort. An alternative to leaving the valley is to immerse our Catholic culture into it. We need vocal Catholics (Christian) in all the regulating and commercial organizations that dominate the world today. We don't need to be an AWS to speak and be heard by AWS. We don't need to block/ban Netflix and Hulu for content and start our own networks, we need to "walk among and with the gentiles" and bring them in. We are called to evangelization, not self-preservation. Hmm.. Probably it's also more affordable and effective.

If on the other hand one wishes to simple ride on the "moral Christian ticket," then, sure, there are probably a lot of folks interested in starting something from scratch (ranging from ideological self preservation to capitalizing on a captive market).

My ttwo cents (not really generous, if you consult Mark 12:42 😉),

-Bronius

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[Beth Nicol]

yes, and yes. Render unto Caesar... we are called to walk The Way in the world. 

peace,
beth

   

[Burke Ingraffia]

There is a school opening up in California named Catholic Polytechnic. See https://catholicpolytechnic.org/

If they could have a sister company to compete, at least on a small scale at first, with AWS and the giants, that could then fund their school, they could be a feeder school for the company.  I think something like this is the path.

[Tim Urban]

Burke and crew,

A friend directed me to this group.  We are migrating customers away from big tech.  Check out Patmos Hosting We are specifically protecting those that are on the front end of risk mitigation (getting cancelled).  We have Catholic clients and secular ones as well.  Let me know if I can answer questions or talk through what we are doing at Patmos.

Patmos (as I'm sure you know), is the island of exile where St. John wrote the book of Revelation.  We are a place of refuge... an island for the exiled.

[Jeff Geerling]

Hi Tim,

I glanced around on your website and it mentions cloud hosting and virtual machines, but one of the topics we've discussed in here is where the underlying hardware resides. (See past history of this thread—replying to multiple emails in rapid succession is a bit off-putting...)

Is your server hardware self-hosted? Colocated? What kind of peering do you have? I think those are important questions considering most hosting providers just bootstrap things off AWS, Google Cloud, or elsewhere, which are (if not already, future) targets for discriminatory practices.

-Jeff


> On Aug 31, 2022, at 1:12 PM, Tim Urban <urb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey all,
>
> A friend directed me to this thread. We are migrating customers away from big tech. Check out Patmos Hosting We are specifically protecting those that are on the front end of risk mitigation (getting cancelled). We have Catholic clients and secular ones as well. Let me know if I can answer questions or talk through what we are doing at Patmos.
>
>
> Patmos (as I'm sure you know), is the island of exile where St. John likely wrote the book of Revelation. We are a place of refuge... an island for the exiled.

>
> On Wednesday, August 31, 2022 at 11:27:12 AM UTC-6 burke.i...@gmail.com wrote:
> There is a school opening up in California named Catholic Polytechnic. See https://catholicpolytechnic.org/
>
> If they could have a sister company to compete, at least on a small scale at first, with AWS and the giants, that could then fund their school, they could be a feeder school for the company. I think something like this is the path.
>
> On Tuesday, August 30, 2022 at 2:14:13 PM UTC-4 beth....@gmail.com wrote:
> yes, and yes. Render unto Caesar... we are called to walk The Way in the world.
> peace,
> beth
>
>
>
>

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[Burke Ingraffia]

I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer, but:

1. The hosting offers S3 storage - that is AWS

2. Patmos.Tech sits on Cloudflare (and this one-page website is really lacking much information or turn-key service)

3. Their MX records are pointed to Google (good luck keeping things private)

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[Beth Nicol]

Just wondering:  Have any of you actually been thrown out, blocked, censored? If so, for what reason? To be honest, most of the sites/people I see squawking about this censorship, blocking etc are those spreading fake news, alternate facts, sedition (if only more of those were blocked) and other things that I would like to see blocked. Oh, and the complaints about some random postings on FB that feature gorgeous male models wearing very little clothing. 

But -- I'd like to know if anyone has experience with being blocked. I know that China and Russia and some other authoritarian governments do block news and religious news, but going to a private provider wouldn't solve that.

And, yes, I do have a healthy suspicion of security amateurs. I was one once myself and I know all kinds of trouble you can get in to.

peace,
beth

   

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[Burke Ingraffia]

Hi Beth,

I have no experience where I can say that I have been banned or censored. Although after the time I started posting pro-life tweets (that were loving, not angry), the amount of replies and engagements I got on all of my tweets became zero. I can't prove it, but I had the feeling I was "shadow banned."

It is not the past that I am concerned with here, though.  It is the present flowing into the future.  I have experienced, in the tech and business communities, an ever-growing anti-religious zeal that is fueled by a lack of liberal arts studies, the Western tradition, and solid moral roots.  Having moved from the South to the East Coast five years ago, it is somewhat unsettling.

I believe that God wins in the end. I really do.  But between now and the end, I believe we have to measure the probable trajectory of human hearts, minds, and wills in our young people and in those who make business decisions. 

Private providers are often dragged around by their noisiest shareholders and employees (who are often those who are at peace the least) and the social-and-legacy-media-driven negative public perceptions that occur when traditional values are upheld — and those perceptions affect their quarterly stock price.

[Lance Johnson]

Jeff, Burke, All,

Lance Johnson here - partner with Tim Urban at Patmos who chimed in earlier. I figured I'd try to address a few things about Patmos since there are some specific questions.

First, Burke is right that our current website lacks a lot of functionality. While the company is officially a year old, we've been in a quiet launch phase and have been focused on ensuring that our infrastructure is working correctly while focusing on our earliest customers. We are actively working on building out our public-facing website, but we have a fully functional cloud infrastructure up and running. Within the next 1-4 months the ability of customers to self-onboard will be in place. In the meantime, all onboarding is being done on a personalized basis, and we're always open to talking to anyone that is interested in what we are doing.

To address Jeff's specific questions:

Is your server hardware self-hosted? Colocated? We own all of our own hardware, including all of the racks, routers, switches, and server metal. We are currently operating out of a private data center in Kansas City, but we are in a specifically demised, privately caged space. Our long term plan is to own at least one of our own entire data centers, but as I'm sure many people here are aware, that is highly capital intensive, so that is something we are working toward. Like many other smaller players in the market, we are open to colocation for future expansion, but it is by no means our sole model.

What kind of peering do you have? We currently use a four-carrier blend for IP transit, but we also have access to a large peering network through our data center. Some of our peering networks include KCIX, AMS-IX Bay Area, MICE, FCIX, STLIX, HOUIX, DE-CIX NY, IX-Denver, SIX Seattle, and DE-CIX Frankfurt.

I think those are important questions considering most hosting providers just bootstrap things off AWS, Google Cloud, or elsewhere. We are definitely not just bootstrapping off of other providers. That said, we do have one customer in production that has need of a wider CDN than we can directly support with our own hardware at this time, so we have worked with another provider in that specific case to add some geographically distributed nodes for the time being. Even in the case of this specific customer, all of their logic is running on our hardware, we leverage those edge nodes exclusively for content delivery.

And also some of Burke's specific points:

The hosting offers S3 storage - that is AWS. To be clear our object storage solution is fully in-house, it is not AWS. S3 was developed by Amazon, true, but there are many S3-compatible solutions that are not riding on AWS. All objects stored in our solution are stored in our own data centers.

Patmos.Tech sits on Cloudflare. We do use Cloudflare for DNS. We know that the type of service we are offering is basically painting a target on our back. Cloudflare does what it does very well, and they have also taken strong stands on freedom of speech on the internet. Given this, we feel confident that Cloudflare can serve us well at this time. Cloudflare is not our "host." I agree, that would raise some red flags.

Their MX records are pointed to Google. Absolutely right. We played with other options, including ProtonMail, which we used for almost a year, but building out a scalable business on ProtonMail and Calendar proved to be nearly impossible. What we found is that most business is not conducted by email, and when email is involved, 80% of the time someone using Google is involved, so those conversations enter the Google ecosystem anyhow. Even just look at where this Group conversation is taking place. We don't want to pretend that we can hide from Google. While we don't see Google as a long-term provider, like Cloudflare, they are good at what they do, and we want to focus on making our core product offering great, not trying to hide from big brother.

If anyone is interested in talking about what we do, we're always here to talk. And we're always open to hearing constructive comments about what we can do to better serve our customers and communities.

Pax,
Lance

[Burke Ingraffia]

Lance,

Thank you for these clarifications.  I did laugh a little as I was writing about Google privacy in a Google forum.

If I can be of assistance in any UI development or front-end work, please let me know.

Burke