[escapologybb]

Wait a minute, not sure I follow. Do you mean that I can run something like one of the forum communities I mentioned on the Raspberry Pi, but then offload all of the grunt work to Amazon?

Obviously that would mean that the Raspberry Pi would always need to be connected to the Internet which wouldn't believe much of a problem, but aren't there fairly significant privacy concerns with doing something like that? Or do you think it's possible to mitigate those concerns by encrypting the link to Amazon, I am only speculating wildly here while I furiously Google all of the acronyms you mentioned. :-)

Thanks!

[janpieterz]

You can indeed run a forum community but offload the work to Amazon. Speaking about that, you can easily run everything on Amazon, because the latency between your webserver and the database might become a problem.

Privacy concerns wise, Amazon and Azure and the sorts are probably way better protected than your own installation. Of course the privacy with Amazon and Azure are all clearly written in their terms of usage and privacy statements. And NSA wise, if they get into an Amazon (either politically or technically) they will easily be able to hack your own installation.

[tinco]

If offloading things to Amazon is an option, why use a Raspberry Pi at all? Wasn't the sport of it to get it running on a Pi? If it only has to look like it's run on a Raspberry Pi you might as well let it run Nginx as a reverse proxy to a discourse.org forum.