What Is the Cloud and Should I Trust It?
The cloud is other people’s computers. This is not a dismissal — it is the most accurate description. When you store files in Google Drive, your files are on Google’s computers in Google’s data centers. When you run an application on AWS, it runs on Amazon’s servers. When you use Salesforce, your business data lives in Salesforce’s infrastructure.
“The cloud” is a marketing term that obscures a simple reality: someone else owns and controls the hardware your data lives on. That someone else is almost always a large corporation with interests that may or may not align with yours.
Understanding the cloud — what it is, what it is good for, and where it poses risks — is essential for any builder who takes sovereignty seriously.
What the Cloud Actually Offers
Cloud computing emerged because managing physical server infrastructure is expensive and complex. Before cloud providers, companies had to buy servers, colocate them in data centers, hire operations teams, and manage hardware failures themselves. AWS changed this by offering compute, storage, and networking as a service — pay for what you use, scale up or down instantly, no hardware management.
The genuine advantages are real:
Elasticity: Scale resources instantly. A startup can handle ten users or ten million users on the same platform — pay for what you use, scale when you need to.
Global distribution: Deploy your application close to users anywhere in the world. AWS has data centers on six continents. A solo developer can run globally distributed infrastructure that would have required a major operations team a decade ago.
Managed services: Databases, message queues, AI models, email delivery, DNS management — these are complex to operate. Cloud providers manage the operational burden in exchange for a monthly fee.
Reliability: Major cloud providers maintain 99.9-99.99% uptime commitments, backed by redundant systems and global failover infrastructure that no individual organization could replicate cost-effectively.
These benefits are real. They explain why most technology companies use cloud infrastructure.
The Risks Nobody Advertises
Account termination: Cloud providers can and do terminate accounts. When Parler’s AWS account was terminated in 2021, the business was offline within hours with no recourse. When Wikileaks was dropped by AWS in 2010, it was done within a day of political pressure. Any content or service that a cloud provider decides violates their terms — or that they face political pressure to remove — can be eliminated instantly.
This is not hypothetical for Black organizations. Platforms hosting activist content, political commentary, or community organizing have faced account terminations and demonetization. The legal protections that prevent government censorship do not apply to private corporations.
Cost unpredictability: AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure pricing is complex enough to have spawned entire consulting industries. Misconfigured services can generate bills of thousands of dollars in hours. There are documented cases of developers receiving $50,000+ monthly bills from a single API misconfiguration. Cloud providers do not proactively warn you about runaway costs — they send you the bill.
Data sovereignty: Your data in US-based cloud infrastructure is subject to US law, including the CLOUD Act, which allows US law enforcement to access data stored by US companies regardless of where that data physically resides. If you store sensitive community data in AWS, US federal agencies can access it through legal process.
Vendor lock-in: AWS services are not portable. An application deeply integrated with DynamoDB (Amazon’s proprietary database), Lambda functions, API Gateway, and S3 is difficult and expensive to migrate to another provider. The migration cost is designed to keep you on the platform.
Pricing increases: Cloud providers periodically increase prices or remove free tier services with minimal notice. Your cost structure today is not your cost structure in three years.
A Framework for Decision-Making
Not all cloud use is equal risk. Here is a practical framework:
High-risk cloud use (avoid for sensitive operations):
- Storing personally identifiable information about community members
- Hosting politically sensitive content
- Core business logic that cannot survive account termination
- Data that US law enforcement should not access
Lower-risk cloud use (acceptable with mitigation):
- Static asset hosting (images, videos) — easily mirrored
- CDN (content delivery network) — vendor-switchable
- DNS management — transferable in hours
- Email delivery (transactional) — switchable with some effort
Mitigation strategies for any cloud use:
- Keep exportable backups of all data in formats that are not vendor-specific
- Design your application to be cloud-agnostic — avoid proprietary managed services where open alternatives exist
- Maintain the ability to migrate within 48 hours if an account is terminated
- Never put your entire operation on a single provider
Hybrid Sovereignty: The Practical Path
Pure on-premises hosting is not realistic for most organizations. Pure cloud hosting with no sovereignty considerations is reckless. The practical answer is a hybrid architecture:
Core application: Self-hosted on a VPS (Hetzner, DigitalOcean) you control. Your application code, your database, your user data.
Content delivery: Cloudflare CDN (with caveats — Cloudflare is also a US company) or BunnyCDN for static assets. Easy to switch.
DNS: Cloudflare DNS or self-managed BIND on your VPS. Keep your domain registration independent from your DNS provider.
Email: Transactional email via Mailgun or Postmark for reliability, or self-hosted for maximum control.
Backups: Automated daily backups to a provider different from your primary host. Backblaze B2 is inexpensive and not a Big Tech company.
This architecture gives you the reliability and global reach of cloud infrastructure while maintaining meaningful control over your most sensitive components.
The Political Economy of Cloud
Three companies — AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — control approximately 65% of global cloud infrastructure. These are the same companies that have cooperated with government surveillance programs, provided computing resources for military operations many find ethically objectionable, and made unilateral decisions to remove content and services.
This concentration of control over digital infrastructure is a structural problem, not just an individual risk. The sovereign response is to use cloud infrastructure where it provides genuine value, minimize dependency on proprietary services, maintain migration capabilities, and actively support alternative infrastructure providers and open standards.
Trust the cloud where it earns trust. Build the skills to leave when it does not.