Personal cloud + AWS setup

alex

— 2 min read

Companies have clouds that they control where their data live, their workloads run, and their general "digital lives" take place. Why shouldn't individuals have the same? The idea of a personal cloud has been living rent-free in my head for at least two or three years now.

Being that I have acquired a very particular set of skills over a very medium-length career, I've been working on and off on a personal cloud of my own. There are a couple reasons this remains my pet project:

  • Dissatisfaction with the status quo where our digital lives are fragmented and we don't have real access to our own data.
  • Balancing life as a discount attorney with some actual technology work.
  • Belief that the usefulness of recent AI applied statistics / LLM tech is directly correlated with the level of personalization in the training data used.
  • A distrust of random startups to responsibly keep and use said personal data.
  • OK, fine, a little bit of hubris and wondering "surely this is not that hard and good software can still be made by one person."

state of the cloud

So what have I got so far? Mostly a couple of AWS accounts and a barebones Dropbox replacement :)

bedrock of the cloud: account #s + emails redacted for obvious reasons

Without getting too into the weeds, there is an umbrella where the management account owns the whole shebang. The icebox account contains automated data backups: browsing history, saved articles and highlights, google calendar data, apple contacts... along with the occasional manual file uploads. Some of this feeds into a "personal google" web app – but that's a post for another day.

Why bother with this fancy account structure? tl;dr - Security and organization. One of the goals is to enable deploying more software and it's useful to keep things isolated where appropriate. I want to easily deploy toy apps, but I don't want their compromise to also leak my entire set of personal data backups. With this scaffolding, I can run workloads in isolated accounts without needing a new AWS setup from scratch every time.

Shoutout to Ben Limmer for tipping me off to this latest and greatest in AWS setup. This was surprisingly not painful and only took about a day or so.

So that's my personal cloud so far. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

appendix a: existing work

Some fellow travelers on the path, who have had similar thoughts and inclinations:

appendix b: trusting amazon

"If distrust of third parties is a motive, aren't you still trusting Amazon with your data?" Yes, I am. Insofar as I'm not quite paranoid enough to fly my own servers on drones above international waters, I have to trust some sort of vendor at some level... and honestly? AWS, for all their faults, is easily top 3 (if not #1) of vendors I've worked with. They have a long history of excellent operational chops and doing right by their customers with regards to product, price, and whatever else. Could do a lot worse.

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