> The internet got its main strengths from the fact that it was completely decentralized.
Decentralized in terms of many companies making up the internet. Yes we've seen heavy consolidation in now having less than 10 companies make up the bulk of the internet.
The problem here isn't caused by companies chosing one cloud provider over the other. It's the economies of scale leading us to few large companies in any sector.
> Decentralized in terms of many companies making up the internet
Not companies, the protocols are decentralized and at some point it was mostly non-companies. Anyone can hook up a computer and start serving requests which was/is a radical concept, we've lost a lot, unfortunately
I think one reason is that people are just bad at statistics. Chance of materialization * impact = small. Sure. Over a short enough time that's true for any kind of risk. But companies tend to live for years, decades even and sometimes longer than that. If we're going to put all of those precious eggs in one basket, as long as the basket is substantially stronger than the eggs we're fine, right? Until the day someone drops the basket. And over a long enough time span all risks eventually materialize. So we're playing this game, and usually we come out ahead.
But trust me, 10 seconds after this outage is solved everybody will have forgotten about the possibility.
Sure, but on a typical outage how likely is it that you'll have that all up and running before the outage is resolved?
And secondly, how often do you create that backup and are you willing to lose the writes since the last backup?
That backup is absolutely something people should have, but I doubt those are ever used to bring a service back up. That would be a monumental failure of your hosting provider (colo/cloud/whatever)
Decentralized with respect to connectivity. If a construction crew cuts a fiber bundle routing protocols will route around the damage and packets keep showing up at the destination. Or, only a localized group of users will be affected. That level of decentralization is not what we have at higher levels in the stack with AWS being a good example.
Even connectivity has it's points of failure. I've touched with my own hands fiber runs that, with a few quick snips from a wire cutter, could bring sizable portions of the Internet offline. Granted that was a long time ago so those points of failure may no longer exist.
Well, that is exactly what resilient distributed network are about. Not that much the technical details we implement them through, but the social relationship and balanced in political decision power.
Be it a company or a state, concentration of power that exeeds the needs for their purpose to function by a large margin is always a sure way to spread corruption, create feedback loop in single point of failure, and is buying everyone a ticket to some dystopian reality with a level of certainty that beats anything that a SLA will ever give us.
Decentralized in terms of many companies making up the internet. Yes we've seen heavy consolidation in now having less than 10 companies make up the bulk of the internet.
The problem here isn't caused by companies chosing one cloud provider over the other. It's the economies of scale leading us to few large companies in any sector.